Gee, ya think?

This is about as close an admission as we're going to get that the so-called "strong economy" of the Bush years despite anemic at best job growth and stagnant wages was a function of homeowners using their bubble-inflated homes as a piggybank:

“Everybody was basically using their house as an A.T.M. machine,” said Dave Simonsen, a senior vice president for NAI Alliance, an industrial real estate firm in Reno. “Now they are upside down on their house without that piggy bank to go back to.”

From 2004 through 2006, Americans pulled about $840 billion a year out of residential real estate, via sales, home equity lines of credit and refinanced mortgages, according to data presented in an updated working paper by James Kennedy, an economist, and Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman. These so-called home equity withdrawals financed as much as $310 billion a year in personal consumption from 2004 to 2006, according to the data.

But in the first half of this year, equity withdrawals were down 15 percent nationally compared with the average for the last three years, and consumption supported by such funds plunged nearly one-fourth, according to the Kennedy and Greenspan data.

This summer, the size of withdrawals fell even more sharply to about one-third below the level of late last year, according to Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com.

“This slide in equity withdrawal is very recent,” Mr. Zandi said, “so you wouldn’t expect the drop in spending to occur until now, or Christmas.”

Only a year ago, money taken out of houses was still more than 9 percent of the nation’s disposable income, Mr. Zandi calculated, using a sampling of Equifax credit reports to supplement Fed data. By this fall, it had dropped to about 5 percent, a difference of about $350 billion a year.

Much of the attention in the recent collapse of the housing boom has focused on those in danger of losing their home or facing higher monthly payments in their adjustable mortgages. But the broader effect on the economy is likely to come from the much larger group of homeowners who can no longer count on rising home values to bolster their wealth.

You know what? I have no sympathy for people who find themselves tapped out because they decided to blow their home equity on home theatres and in-ground pools and Ford Excursions and vacations in Tahiti. You don't have to be a genius to know that tapping equity for ephemera is really goddamn stupid. It's one thing to take an equity loan to remodel the kitchen, though I would say that the way things look now, those who spent $70,000 to put a gourmet kitchen with custom cabinets, tumbled marble floors, commercial appliances, and quartz countertops in a 1950's cape cod aren't going to see a return on that investment. But at least that's putting the money back into the asset. Tapping home equity for things that wear out within a few years or are gone within a few weeks is just plain stupid.

But it's hard to believe that retailers are going to enjoy the kind of holiday seasons they've had in recent years.

Mr. Brilliant and I have no equity loans and no credit card debt. And when we go out to buy our HDTV this season, we'll probably get a really good price. And if we buy it on a "no interest for eighteen months" plan, we won't be paying interest either, because it'll be paid in less time than that.

Sometimes deferred gratification has its advantages.

As long as Maggie's obsession with the walls in the basement doesn't mean there's mice behind them. That would mean basement remodeling. And then I won't be able to be so damn smug.