An interesting Reuters article titled To save or to spend? Americans ponder their duty highlights the current dilemma facing the nation. On the one hand, most people are financially overextended and will tend to save. On the other hand, what the economy needs right now to slow down its current collapse is for people to spend (the Stimulus by itself will be far from sufficient to do that).
What's interesting is that here's a situation where the individual self-interest and the collective interest are misaligned. Free-market capitalism is based, among other things, on the notion that the pursuit of individual self-interest leads to collective prosperity. That notion, as during the Great Depression, will surely be under attack for years to come.
Another dilemma is short-term versus long-term. Ideally, people should collectively be spending now until the economy stabilizes and only then start saving. As you can judge from the article, it will be quite a tall order to convince people to do just that, and in that order please.
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