Too little consumer spending?

A common fallacy, fostered directly by the net-income ap­proach, holds that the important category of expenditures in the production system is consumers’ spending. Many writers have gone so far as to relate business prosperity directly to consumers’ spending, and depressions of business to declines in consumers’ spending. “Business cycle” considerations will be deferred to later chapters, but it is clear that there is little or no relationship between prosperity and consumers’ spending; indeed almost the reverse is true. For business prosperity, the important considera­tion is the price spreads between the various stages—i.e., the rate of interest return earned. It is this rate of interest that induces capitalists to save and invest present goods in productive factors. The rate of interest, as we have been demonstrating, is set by the configurations of the time preferences of individuals in the society. It is not the total quantity of money spent on consump­tion that is relevant to capitalists’ returns, but the margins, the spreads, between the product prices and the sum of factor prices at the various stages—spreads which tend to be proportionately equal throughout the economy.

...says Rothbard in Man, Economy and State (chapter 6). Those (economists) who focus on "consumer spending" (or spending in general) as an indication of the health of the economy are missing the point.