"We are all socialists now," Newsweek says on the cover this week. Not quite.

Instead, the job losses all over the state and the country remind us of a crucial fact of life: Our economy depends on sales.

And it's not just the private sector. The public sector too cannot long survive unless there's robust activity in things being bought and sold.

School districts are having to deal with falling revenue projections because state tax collections have shrunk. They have shrunk because earnings have stalled or disappeared. Earnings are down because less of just about everything is being bought. When the makers of goods can't sell them, they cut back or close down, further reducing the number of people who can afford to buy things and and dampening the willingness to do so among the rest.

The federal stimulus package pending in Congress may have a lot of faults. But it does have incentives for people to buy things, including houses and cars. In that, President Obama and Congress are on the right track. (hh)