by Michael Snyder, The Economic Collapse Blog:

When the going gets tough, it can be extremely tempting to pile on debt as a solution.  The cost of living is rising much faster than most of our paychecks are, and this is putting an enormous amount of financial stress on hard working Americans.  But rather than cutting back on spending, a lot of people are choosing to deal with that financial stress by going into more debt.  In fact, we just learned that U.S. household debt reached an all-time record high of 16.9 trillion dollars last quarter…