According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, consumer spending was 59.5 percent of the economy in 1969 as compared to 68.1 percent of GDP in the third quarter of 2019. Further to the point, the savings rate in the decades of 1960s through the 1980s was on average, 11.87 percent; whereas in the decade beginning in 2010, it was on average just 7.78 percent, representing a precipitous decline of nearly 35 percent to those previous decades. This would indicate that Americans are spending their income and/or their savings at a much higher rate on consumer goods than they historically have done, while also saving less and less of their money in aggregate. So that, it can be said that Americans are certainly putting off tomorrow for today, for they rather are trying to maximize what they can consume today, and apparently are not worrying about what tomorrow will bring.
Americans live in a culture in which its commercial advertising does an outstanding job of convincing many of those Americans, of their immediate need to purchase all sorts of consumer goods, and Americans, more often than not, are only too willing to fulfill that need, to a tee. The main problem with the fact that so many Americans give in to that immediate gratification, is that they so often end up spending money, that they haven't even earned yet, on items that they believe that they have a need of; but, in which, in all probability, their need is not nearly as urgent as imagined, and further, seldom have these items been properly vetted.
The days of Benjamin Franklin's aphorisms, such as "a penny saved is a penny earned," being considered something to live by seems to have passed a great deal of Americans by, as something that belongs solely to some sort of bygone era, and hence has little or no relevancy to today. That is a true shame, because many of those people that fail to save an appropriate percentage of what they have earned, today, are forsaking tomorrow, for today; and will subsequently not have the monetary assets to live a life of good retirement, let alone having anything of material worth really associated with their name.
The fact of the matter is that spending and saving are constantly at a tug of war with one another, and as long as there is tension between those two sides, that probably is good; but when one side, clearly is the victor, the balance that most people need in their lives is thereupon lost. Those that make the mistake of unwittingly giving in to the siren song of seemingly spending everything that they earn, are allowing that endless lure of material things to enrapture them; and are subsequently left with an empty pocketbook, so that they thereby have nothing of substance to fall back on, when such is needed.
Sure, being frugal and prudent, seems pretty boring; but a mature person, correctly weighs decisions in their mind, before they execute their decisions, because they recognize that the life we build is based upon the decisions so made, and those that are too quick to spend their money before they have really thought upon the why of that spending, ultimately aren't going to find themselves in a good place.