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The United States is awash in debt. Median household debt has risen to more than $100,000 from less than $60,000 in 1990, even as median incomes have increased only slightly. Much of the debt is held by workers who are building up loans on credit cards, or obtaining dubious mortgages in a bid to secure some fraction of the lifestyle of an upper class that keeps getting richer. This increase in debt has occurred as the gap between the rich and the poor has continued to widen and the visibility of coveted luxury goods on television and the Internet has continued to grow.

Some laud the democratization of credit, seeing its availability to wider swaths of the American population as broadening opportunity; some criticize it as the ruthless seduction by financial institutions of working people who will one day face bankruptcy because they will be unable to pay credit card bills and mortgages.

But this is much clear: the spread of debt is one of the most significant social phenomena in the United States today, allowing the less affluent to spend more than they have. As long as interest rates do not rise steeply, this will continue to happen.