Our Mounting Credit Card Debt

I thought this gave some numbers on the total Credit Card Debt but it only says 2.2 TRILLION was spent on credit cards last year. I assume a lot or most of that was paid off, but maybe this is the portion that was not paid off. Either way, we owe a lot of money.

And the US is a consumer driven economy, but we're consuming more than we can pay for. Add this to the government total debt and it looks more and more like everything is based on AIR. How long can this go on?

I really fear the whole system is going to stumble and fall one day. And just because I don't have any debt other than my mortgage, I doubt I will be any better off. We have a tendency of bailing people out -- which might make people with lots of debt that vanishes actually better off then me. But I'm hardly going to run up a huge debt and count on everything crashing and being bailed out by the government. With my luck, the crash would happen the day after I paid everything back or defaulted and they took everything away.

When credit cards put you in jeopardy - CNN.com