Americans Joining Disability Is Now Outpacing Americans Finding Jobs: Is This a Sign of a Coming Depression?

Pro-consumer? I don't think so. Our economy is a circle. What happens in one sector impacts the rest, and at each point on the circle the government impacts what happens in the private sector.
Let's look at the 2008 great recession, in which 8.3 million jobs were destroyed. According to the Federal Reserve of St. Louis, 22% of those jobs were directly in the construction sector, with most of the rest a result of those construction jobs lost.
What happened? The US banking sector had been overheated, making loan after loan, particularly in the commercial real estate and construction market (not just individual loans) without consideration to the effects of excessive numbers of such loans in a bank's portfolio and each bank's ability to meet the capital needs to fund those loans. The US Treasury was involved in trying to solve the increasing number of banks who were in trouble because of those excessive loans. US Treasury Sec. Geithner, appointed by Obama in 2008, with full authority to allocate TARP funds approved by the US Congress in October, 2008, ordered Treasury officials working with the banks to require them to get out of all EXISTING real estate and construction loans by any means possible.
(For proof, read the board minutes of 2007-2008 involving the sale of the largest regional bank at the time, National City Bank, to PNC Bank, using $7 billion in TARP funding, in which US Treasury officials were in attendance. Those minutes were printed in the Cleveland Plain Dealer.)
The result of that ruling/order from the US Treasury was that the banks chose specific real estate and construction loans and declared them "bad" without cause and for no reason, shutting down construction projects all across the nation, merely because the banks had the power to do so. -- A federal judge in a NCC case in Chicago, Illinois refused to hear evidence of verbal fraud by the bank, and ruled that, while the bank had no reason to call such a loan, and acted in bad faith, it "had the right to do so."
All private commercial construction projects in this country are financed through such loans. The people you refer to as "rich" are the ones out there taking risks and pledging everything they own on those loans in order to build buildings and jobs. In most cases, they have worked 70-80 hours a week for most of their lives to build businesses. Each one of those construction loans called on ongoing construction projects led directly to the layoffs of construction workers working directly on the project, to manufacturers of the materials and equipment supplying the project to having to lay off workers, to the manufacturers of appliances, furniture, flooring and other consumer goods laying off workers. In those cases, many of those various contractors and suppliers went unpaid for work completed, with the only option to file mechanics liens to try to recover a part of the money owed them.
The workers who lost their jobs then had problems paying their mortgages, paying for their vehicles, and basic family needs -- thus, reduced consumer spending.
Right now, the climate of government regulation/rule-makng and the lack of attention or ignorance of such unintended consequences by bureaucrats such as Obama's appointed Treasury Secretary Geithner has created a climate of concern that whatever a business does is subject to seizure or destruction on the whim of such bureaucrats. That is a big reason why jobs are not coming back, and those jobs fuel consumer spending.