As a society, we are addicted to debt. We use it to buy just about everything – groceries, gas, clothing, cars, homes and education.

As another class of students graduates from college this spring, they will face more debt than any of the generations that have come before them. Two-thirds of them will graduate college owing an average of $19,000, as our latest installment of our series, What’s Next, points out.

That might not be a problem if the average incomes many of them will have upon graduation kept with the rising cost of tuition and room and board at most four-year institutions. But they haven’t. It doesn’t take a degree in finance to figure out these students will be paying off the cost of their college educations longer than in decades past.

It would, however, probably require an accounting degree to keep track of how many solicitations most of those students received from credit card companies as they were already accumulating debt to pay for their education. The allure of easy money offered by these companies is why many of these students will also graduate with thousands of dollars in high-interest credit card debt.

This means this generation will have less money to spend on consumer goods, which fuels the economy. Those who haven’t maxed out their credit capacity by the time they graduate can, of course, put their purchases on the charge card of their choice. It also means it will likely take the young adults in this generation longer to purchase their first home or begin saving for retirement.

All this individual financial insecurity comes at a time when the U.S. government is more in debt than ever and less prepared to provide for people in their retirement. On May 10, the national debt was $8,817,010,977,746.30, according to the Bureau of Public Debt. Meanwhile, the future of Social Security has never been so uncertain.

It doesn’t take a degree in economics to realize this is going to collapse on us all if we don’t get it under control. Reigning in our debt has to start at home – taking out loans we can afford to pay off and choosing our expenditures wisely.

For example, Leslie Linfield, executive director of the Institute for Financial Literacy in Portland, advises parents to start talking to their children when they are freshmen in high school, to get them thinking about college financing. That’s when their performance in school will start to affect their eligibility for merit-based scholarships. It will also get them thinking early about whether they really want to take on the debt that will come with a prestigious institution.

As students wrestle with their debt, the public needs the support of the federal government to protect them from predatory lending practices. Credit card companies, for example, should not be allowed to charge unreasonably high interest rates and issue intentionally deceptive borrowing terms. Mortgage companies should not be allowed to issue loans to consumers who obviously can’t pay them back. These are predatory practices and should be criminal.

Many of these loans are issued by some of the largest banks in the United States. Congress clearly has oversight of them and an obligation to protect consumers, and consumers have an obligation to exercise more oversight over their own bank accounts.

Brendan Moran, editor