For all the talk about how the Great Recession forever changed the way Americans think about money, spending and saving, the way Americans actually deal with their finances hasn’t changed all that much: They spend most of what they make every month.

The conventional wisdom is that American consumers are anxious, and that anxiety is making them frugal. They were burned by the Great Recession, and, like the generation that lived through the Great Depression, they’ll be scarred for life.

In the first quarter of the year, nominal consumer spending grew at the slowest rate since the recession, leading many people to question whether consumers would ever spend the money they were saving at the gas pump on other things. The skeptics insisted that consumers just weren’t feeling it any more.

The reality is different, however. Americans may be anxious about their jobs, their income, their debt and their wealth, but they are not being particularly frugal.

In fact, consumer spending has never been higher, either in nominal terms or in relation to total gross domestic product. As usual, the U.S. consumer sector is leading not only the U.S. economic recovery but the global recovery as well. The American consumer is the most reliable source of strength in the economy.

Despite the winter slump, consumer spending still hit a record $12.1 trillion annualized in the first quarter, reaching a record high of 68.6% of real gross domestic product. That’s up about 4 percentage points since the late 1990s and up 8 percentage points since the 1960s.

Consumer spending has been accounting for an ever-larger share of GDP, so the fact that it’s at a record level might seem unremarkable to those who’ve been paying attention to the decades-long trend.

Except for the fact that median incomes have been stagnant for decades. And except for the fact that most consumers no longer have a ready way to tap a home-equity loan to finance their spending the way they did a decade ago.

And except for the fact that we are told over and over that today’s consumers are anxiously frugal.

They aren’t frugal. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the personal savings rate in May was 5.1% of after-tax income, well below the long-term average of 8.5% and well below the peak of 15% in 1975. It’s not the lowest savings rate on record, but it’s very low, and it shows that Americans are spending most of what they make each month.

Another piece of conventional wisdom is shattered when we look at what consumers are spending their money on.

Contrary to the idea that the American economy is becoming ever-more dependent upon services, the data show that the share of GDP that’s spending on services is largely unchanged over the past 25 years at about 45%. Most of the increase in spending over the past 15 years was for manufactured goods, both durable and nondurable. Consumer purchases of goods have risen from about 19% of GDP in the early 1990s to more than 23% today.

Government consumption is at an historic low as a share of GDP.

Consumer spending accounts for a larger share of the economy, in part, because the contribution of the other components of GDP has been shrinking rapidly.

For example, back when the U.S. was fighting a “police action” in Korea, government expenditures (not counting transfers such as Social Security or investments such as roads and ships) accounted for nearly a third of GDP. Now that share has fallen to about 14%.

Investments in housing have collapsed.

Investments have also gotten smaller over time. Investments in housing have collapsed, falling from an average of nearly 6% of GDP to less than 1.5% today. Net investment — gross investment minus depreciation — has dropped to the lowest levels since the Great Depression.

Forget what you’ve heard about the Great Recession making Americans frugal again. Consumers have never been more important to the U.S. economy.