Anyone following the op-ed pages of the New York Times over the last few days would have been treated to two diametrically opposed perspectives on the state of the average American worker's finances.

For the sake of convenience, let's refer to these perspectives as "the sane perspective" and "the crazy perspective".

The sane perspective was laid out yesterday by former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who argues that working families are "Totally Spent":

The underlying problem has been building for decades. America’s median hourly wage is barely higher than it was 35 years ago, adjusted for inflation. The income of a man in his 30s is now 12 percent below that of a man his age three decades ago. Most of what’s been earned in America since then has gone to the richest 5 percent.

Yet the rich devote a smaller percentage of their earnings to buying things than the rest of us because, after all, they’re rich. They already have most of what they want. Instead of buying, and thus stimulating the American economy, the rich are more likely to invest their earnings wherever around the world they can get the highest return.

The problem has been masked for years as middle- and lower-income Americans found ways to live beyond their paychecks. But now they have run out of ways...

There’s a limit to how many hours Americans can put into work, so Americans turned to a third way of spending beyond their wages. They began to borrow. With housing prices rising briskly through the 1990s and even faster from 2002 to 2006, they turned their homes into piggy banks by refinancing home mortgages and taking out home-equity loans. But this third strategy also had a built-in limit. With the bursting of the housing bubble, the piggy banks are closing.

The crazy perspective was laid out Sunday by W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, who argue that "You Are What You Spend":

Income statistics, however, don’t tell the whole story of Americans’ living standards. Looking at a far more direct measure of American families’ economic status — household consumption — indicates that the gap between rich and poor is far less than most assume, and that the abstract, income-based way in which we measure the so-called poverty rate no longer applies to our society...

If we compare the incomes of the top and bottom fifths, we see a ratio of 15 to 1. If we turn to consumption, the gap declines to around 4 to 1. A similar narrowing takes place throughout all levels of income distribution. The middle 20 percent of families had incomes more than four times the bottom fifth. Yet their edge in consumption fell to about 2 to 1. The average person in the middle fifth consumes just 29 percent more than someone living in a bottom-fifth household.

To understand why consumption is a better guideline of economic prosperity than income, it helps to consider how our lives have changed. Nearly all American families now have refrigerators, stoves, color TVs, telephones and radios. Air-conditioners, cars, VCRs or DVD players, microwave ovens, washing machines, clothes dryers and cellphones have reached more than 80 percent of households.

But how have Americans managed to increase their consumption faster than they have increased their income? By taking on debt -- which, most people would agree, makes you poorer, especially when you're taking on debt to buy a DVD player or a refrigerator rather than, say, a college education (which can pay back the debt through increased earning potential down the road).

And then there's the other point, which is that many of the "luxuries" that Cox and Alm cite to prove how wealthy underpaid workers are -- things like washing machines and microwave ovens -- are actually labor-saving devices that have gone from optional to required as stagnating incomes have forced more and more one-earner households into becoming two-earner households.  When Mom can stay home with the kids, she has time to spend cooking from scratch; when both Mom and Dad don't get home from work until six or seven P.M., being able to microwave something is often the only way to put dinner on the table in a reasonable amount of time.

Americans need real economic reforms -- including making it easier for them to join together in unions, since unions are the best method yet found to raise the living standards of working people -- to turn these trends around, not platitudes about how well off they are because they have a TV set. The real question is, which one will our elected officials choose to give us? The reforms, or the platitudes?