I'm careful about going into debt. I'm a son of depression parents and I remember our familyi's fear family that my father might lose his job and we would lose all the little we had. When I got my first academic job, my first financial goal was to save a year's income so that if I didn't get tenure I wouldn't have to beg for my next position. I still don't have any debt not secured by a 3:1 equity position. (O.K., I'm an anti-debt obsessive. You aren't raised by Depression-period parents without being that way).
I remember as a kid growing up in the Northwest. I knew this other kid whose dad had a pharmacy. He was a nice kid; played pretty good piano in our jazz band -- he had a kind of long-faced Rachmaninoff visage. When he was a junior in high school his dad went bankrupt and committed suicide. I haven't the faintest idea where the debt came from. Maybe he was playing the ponies, maybe something else. But he killed himself, and his son was shattered.
I'm an economist. The economics of moral hazard is my bread and butter. Easy credit makes encourages bad choices. But it's also a life-buoy. If I lived in the United States and my kid got sick (like I got sick when I was a kid and my parents went into debt to the hospital for three year's of my Dad's gross income as an electrician's apprentice) I wouldn't hestitate to max out my VisaCard. That's moral hazard, too, because if I didn't, the state would pick up the tab before it foreclosed on my home.
It's just sick, this bankruptcy bill. I lost a couple of tens of thousands of dollars on companies loot ed by their CEO's and chief financial officers. That kind of bankruptcy is still protected by title 11. The rest of us might as well be working on a chain gang to 'pay our debt to society'.