Is Anyone Else Starting To Hate Debt As Much As I Do?

Every day I see headlines like "Real Root of this Recession? Too Much Debt!" I saw a statistic just now that says that the total credit card debt by Americans in 2008 reached an all-time high of $951 billion (according to the Federal Reserve).

Doing the back-of-the-envelope math, there are roughly 330 million Americans. If we reduce that by, say, 10%, to account for children (who wouldn't have credit cards yet) and some trivial portion of the population that wouldn't carry credit card debt, that leaves us with around 300 million (I'm sure the actual figure is smaller than that, but I don't know by how much and I don't want to err on the pessimistic side). That would then tell us that the average American with credit card debt carried a balance of more than $3,000 in 2008. Assuming an interest rate of 20%, that means that the (mythical) average American incurred more than $600 in credit card interest last year. While not a huge amount, this is also a country where the rank and file scream blue bloody murder at the hint of a 1% increase in their income or payroll taxes. Since most of them are probably not making $60,000 or more (I think the statistical median household income in the States is below that figure, and that would often include 2 card holders) then that means that they willingly committed $600 or more to the goal of living beyond their means, but would be repulsed by the thought of contributing that same amount to the betterment of their society.

So are people finally starting to see the dark side of debt? I devoted an entire chapter of my 2nd AgileMan book to the true costs of bug debt (with a few remarks about the other kind), and of course waxed eloquent about its financial cousin more than 2 years ago on this very blog. I realize that a lot of people - perhaps even some regular readers here - regard debt as a necessary evil in their lives. And, as I've said many times, it sometimes is... but I really wish that more citizens of the world had the same revulsion toward it that I do. If that were the case, there'd be a greater incidence of it being deemed "evil" and less situations in which it was regarded as "necessary."