…Go on about your daydream world.
I agree.
To whole heartedly believe that the consumer is to blame for doing what they do best (i.e. consume), you close yourself off to the grander scope of
the situation.
In our current framework of society it would be nearly impossible for a person to scrape their way from nothing to having something of their own
without at first, borrowing. You need to borrow first before you can own.
Unless you live in the wilderness, build your log cabin house with your own bare hands, farm, trap, hunt, barter and trade goods with others you may
be able to achieve this goal, but it would be a hard fought and grizzled path.
If anyone wishes to live a little more comfortably, however, as we have all become accustomed to in this day and age, the concept of borrowing becomes
a staple facet of survival in the modern society.
It is this concept that is inherent to the basic understanding of modern economics 101.
As anything is borrowed from someone else, it puts the lender at a dis-advantage because they are unable to now use the tool they loan, whatever that
tool may be (hammer, car, boat, house, capitol, etc.). Since the lender would be doing a great favor to the debtor to borrow without compensation for
loss of access to the tool for that period of time.
As an eventuality, even if the lender is extending the loan as a favor (i.e. with no compensation in mind) the lender will in fact incur a loss in
this situation, where it be the time value, construction value, or investment value of whatever they have loaned to the debtor.
Therefore the concept of the "natural interest rate" comes into being. A rate which can be derived from any free market (free as in: "without
regulation"; the U.S. economy would NOT be an example of a free market) that appropriately compensates the lender for the use value lost when an
asset is loaned to a debtor.
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Economics 101 aside, in a society of comfort, such as ours when people tune in to television, walk down the street, listen to the radio, talk to their
friends or family, they may become compelled to want or need something.
The situation to borrow arises when this person does not have the required capitol to purchase this thing outright. Therefore they seek out a lender,
make an agreement with the lender to borrow x~ amount of capitol, and agree to pay back the lender in regular installments the total amount borrowed
PLUS a standard rate to compensate the lender for the loss of access to the capitol during that time. Once both parties agree on an arrangement, a
contract is struck, the lender is being compensated by interest, and the debtor has the thing for which he/she desires.
This would all be fine if the debtor finds that their income levels and their spending levels leave enough room for the newly acquired cost of
financing their purchase. Even the most un-encumbered or un-educated consumers have little problem understanding this concept, and seem to deal with
it with relative ease.
A hidden problem arises however when the costs this person is expending on daily living expenses begin to rise when at the same time compensation
remains stagnant, or rises at a level slower than the increase in their cost of living.
Even the savviest consumers do not account for this hidden force when they borrow, and as we are now seeing it's starting to put pressure on
consumers where they have never felt it before.
So what do the consumers do to temporarily to try to alleviate this problem? They ask for a raise, or apply for a higher paying job.
And so the business cycle begins. Wages increase, but companies are slowly forced to raise costs; eventually trickling back to increases in the cost
of living for all.
But why in an economy would the cost to produce a loaf of bread one year be different than the previous?
Supply and demand influxes aside, The banks and the Government are solely to blame as this driving force is called:
INFLATION.
One can only hope, eh ? 
