While I’d never bet against the American dream, I would say it’s time to quit borrowing heavily against it.

Most of us must take out a mortgage to buy a house or tap into student loans. But should we really borrow against our future to buy one or two big-screen TVs? Or pull out the plastic to pick up fast food on the way to class? Should we buy whatever we want?

Is that what you’d call living the dream?

I’d call it setting yourself up for the American nightmare.

As the U.S. economy rejiggers and readjusts, we must realize that, eventually, we will get through this latest slump. We’re not destined to fall into an economic abyss.

But once we bounce back, we cannot keep falling for quick financial fixes. We can’t fool ourselves and keep spending like there’s no tomorrow. The rules, clearly, have changed.

For half a century, we’ve lived in a world of easy money and cheap credit. Many families, even middle-income families, made good money with their houses on Main Street and their stocks on Wall Street.

Everyday consumers could pull out the credit card to go to dinner, borrow against the house to take a vacation or take out some student loans to send the children to college.

Wealthier families could rest assured that their investments would make extra money for them.

Nobody needed to save all that much.

That’s not the case anymore.

“Everyone from top to bottom is going to be under financial pressure,” says Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com in West Chester, Pa.

We’ve witnessed an incredible economic shock.

“There is a sense of despair, particularly among those who played by the rules and feel they did everything right,” says Gail Cunningham, senior director of public relations for the National Foundation for Credit Counseling, an association of nonprofit community-based credit counseling agencies.

They went to college, earned a degree, found a good job and saved a little money to buy a home. Many even regularly set aside savings in a 401(k).

And then they saw the stock market implode into a serious bear market. They watched corporations cut jobs and roll out buyouts for people in their 40s and 50s. They saw pension plans get frozen. They saw houses sit empty on their blocks for months as neighbors went into foreclosure or struggled to find a buyer.

Stephen Church, an investment consultant who founded Piscataqua Research Inc. in 1992, studies consumer-oriented financial statistics.

Church, whose company is based in Portsmouth, N.H., says today’s troubles go beyond a run-of-the mill economic downturn or a recession.

He’s concluded that American consumers are out of cash, up to their eyeballs in debt and only lately figuring out that they’re being played for fools.

Before the 1990s, consumers spent about 80 percent of their incomes on daily living expenses and goods such as TVs, clothes and cars. By 2006, consumers spent 89 percent of their incomes on living expenses and consumer goods.

What’s even more troubling, though, is what consumers did with the rest of their money in 2006.

Before the 1990s, about 10 percent of income was being used to pay debt. With 80 percent going to expenses, 10 percent was left for savings and investments, such as stocks, bank accounts or homes.

By 2006, though, consumers were not only spending more on everyday goods – remember, spending 89 percent of income – but also spending more to pay debt. They were spending 13 percent of their incomes to cover debt, Church notes.

For a while, some families could ride out economic storms by tapping into the equity in their homes. Home values continued to go up in many communities, even though the stock market had turned sour for a few years.

As home prices took off in the late 1990s and 2000s, lower- and middle-income consumers borrowed so aggressively that their savings rate reached a shocking negative 10 percent, according to Zandi’s book “Financial Shock” ($24.99, FT Press).

“In other words,” Zandi notes, “they were collectively spending 10 percent more than their income.”

Many families could afford a Lexus or a Hummer only because the dealer would lease them one. Many families could afford that 3,000-square-foot home only because a lender offered a can’t-miss mortgage.

Most consumers never made enough money to support lavish purchases, but they sure had access to the debt.

Rising home equity – and low interest rates and easy credit – fueled a buying binge.

Unfortunately, as financial angst builds, more bad actors will take advantage of it.

If consumers fear that they won’t be able to borrow any money – or make any money on their investments – somebody is bound to create a financial product to play to those worries, says Karen Gross, an expert on consumer finances and indebtedness.

“If you create a crisis mentality, you encourage people to make unwise financial choices because they’re afraid they won’t get anything,” says Gross, president of Southern Vermont College.

We’ll need to be smart – and patient – as we try to regain our financial footing.

“The reality is, there is only one way out of this, and that is to spend less,” Church says. He admits his wife and his kids do not want to hear it.

I’d imagine that most people don’t want to hear it. Some days, I don’t want to hear it. But we all better believe it.

We can’t expect our children to have a better life if we keep spending money we’ve not yet earned. We have to save, rather than spend. If not, as one financial expert told me, we’re eating our young.

No one, of course, wants to hear that. But we better believe it.

Susan Tompor is the personal finance columnist for the Detroit Free Press. She can be reached at stomporfreepress.com.