It’s a picture that’s worth a thousand choruses of “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” Here in the Seventh Straight Successful Year of the Recovery from the Great Recession, tucked into a corner of the Arizona Desert, is a line of parked Union Pacific locomotives. It was discovered on Google Earth, so it is, as they say, visible from space. There are 292 of them, baking in the sun like so many dinosaur skeletons, in a line stretching almost five miles. They, and the people who used to run them, are now “excess capacity” for one of the country’s largest freight haulers. In this, the Seventh Straight Successful Year of the Great Recovery.

No one should be surprised. But even when you know that trade — the buying and selling of stuff — has been slowing down all over the world for years, it is startling to see such stark, graphic evidence that we are all in deep trouble.

Only two people I know of seem to understand the root of this problem: Henry Ford and Howard Davidowitz. Ford, according to persistent legend, doubled his workers’ wages because he realized that if they weren’t making enough money to afford to buy one of his cars he would go out of business. (Never mind whether the story is true or not, it contains an important truth.) Davidowitz, a world class consultant to retail merchants, said upon analysis he found that the problem was that the consumers on whom everyone is relying to save the economy don’t have — and I’m quoting here — “any fucking money.”

Lord knows we’ve tried to help, mainly by allowing him to borrow more. We showed him how to use his house as an ATM cash dispenser until he was so far in debt and under water he tanked the economy of most of the civilized world. We raised the limits on his credit cards until they were all maxed out. We made financing a new car easier than buying a gun in Chicago, and that worked for a while.

But. Everything has to be paid for, eventually. Borrowed money has to be returned, eventually, along with the interest. That’s not just a theory, like evolution. It’s a fact, like gravity.

We and much of the rest of the world have turned ourselves into a consumer economy just when the world’s consumers, like the unfortunate pilot, ran out of airspeed, altitude and ideas. A nation of bartenders and short-order cooks is unable to support the shopping malls we have provided for them.

How did we ever convince ourselves that we could prosper by consuming, without making anything? Now that we know we can’t, what are we going to do? Elect Donald Trump?