[amh]

I'll agree on one thing, there's a very strong need for kids and teens to get a better understanding of personal finance. Although it's probably a lot more effective coming from parents than from the state.

But I think you are giving the consumer way too much of a free pass for their own misbehavior. I'm not completely without sympathy for people who are honestly having a hard time paying for the essentials of life. But what about the people who finance a new car because a 10 year old used econo-box would be beneath them? The people who buy expensive packaged foods instead of cooking from cheaper raw ingredients? People who have a satellite dish on their doublewide? As evidenced by the recent increase in savings rates, US consumers have the ability to cut back when they need to.

As for getting "snookered" into mortgages, who the hell makes the biggest purchase of their lives based on a 5 minute sales pitch without doing any research or considering what happens when the ARM resets? I'll give a 90 year old grandma a pass for getting snookered by fraud, but some people are just plain careless with their money and mostly deserve the consequences for making bad decisions. That's not a popular viewpoint in the current environment, but the alternative leads straight to "too big to fail" and taxpayer funded corporate losses.