Wall Street Journal Article

Utah vividly illustrates the changes credit has wrought in the U.S. Last year, 28 of every 1,000 Utah households filed for bankruptcy, twice the national average and nearly triple Utah's rate a decade earlier, according to Economy.com, a West Chester, Pa., consulting firm. Utahns often get married early and have the largest families in the nation on average. That makes for a lot of young parents with modest incomes looking for big homes and cars. The median monthly mortgage payment in Utah equaled 45.3% of a worker's average monthly income in 2002, the fourth-highest level in the nation, according to the Utah Foundation, a Salt Lake City think tank.

In a conservative, largely Mormon state that favored George Bush over John Kerry, 72% to 26%, the surge in bankruptcies has led to soul-searching. At a conference of Mormon officials in April, Thomas Monson, the church's second-ranking leader, said he was "appalled" at advertising for home-equity loans that is "designed to tempt us to borrow more in order to have more." He repeated the words a Mormon elder spoke during the Depression: "Interest never sleeps nor sickens nor dies.... Once in debt, interest is your companion every minute of the day and night."

FULL ARTICLE Lagging Behind the Wealthy, Many Use Debt to Catch Up