The Case for Debt  Public anxiety over “excessive” consumer debt
has a long, and misguided, history. By Virginia Postrel  By
Virginia Postrel For many poor Americans, credit cards can still
be a better deal than payday loans and pawnshops. (Photo credit:
Philip James Corwin/Corbis)  A couple of weeks after last
Christmas, a newspaper reporter telephoned Todd Zywicki, a
George Mason University law professor who studies bankruptcy and
consumer credit. How, she wanted to know, were American families
going to pay the huge credit-card bills they’d run up buying
presents? Well, Zywicki responded, how had they paid their
Christmas bills the previous year, and the year before that, and
the year before that? “It never occurred to her that this was an
old story,” he says.  Or, as we in the journalism business call
it, an evergreen: always in season. Through good times and bad,
Americans predictably rack up consumer debt, and that debt
predictably generates public and private hand-wringing about how
it will ever get pai