Your assessment is right on. It's going to hit here in Utah at some time and the LDS church is so concerned that they've been having talks about it to their members at Sunday services. There's several new suburbs right by me where couples in their 20s have $250-350,000 homes(equivalent to about $600,000 on the coasts), only one wage earner, new SUV, new mini-van, huge flat panel tvs, expensive furntiture, etc... . They're using credit cards to make payments on other credit cards, eat out six times a week, and generally(from talking to some of them) are literally swimming in debt. All of this has to come crashing down at some time, but they all want it now, not later.
What happened to financial discipline and economics in school?