You know, as much as I hate to be a bigot (and, as a minority in this country, believe me, stereotypes _hurt_), I have to agree with your generational assessments. Furthermore, I think it's both the boomers and the "echo boomers" (born 1980 to 1995) that are perpetrating this easy money fallacy.

Though alot of people will say it started well before, I'll say it seriously accelerated starting with George W. Bush, and I'll tell you why. Even though W graduated from Yale and Harvard (and had a father who did the same and who was a paratrooper and CIA director then VP then Prez), he was still looked at as kind of the lovable fuck-up, the "guy you'd wanna have beers with", i.e., an everyman. Very little elitism in his manner or his folksy talk with put-on Southern accent (even though he was born and raised in Connecticut). Everything he did was done "by the gut," given little more than "hope and faith" before decisions were made. It seemed easy. The way he damned the terrorists before making a golf swing, the time he simply waved his hand and made stem cell research disappear in a fog of amoral haze, the way he magically made trillions "appear" for the Nation's tax cuts and stimulus checks, the way he funded wars without accounting for them in the general budget.

It seemed like magical, heady times. We didn't even understand it, but we loved it. Even though 9/11 came and went under his administration, we didn't feel the true weight of it, because it was all put on credit.

That's ALL we knew. Credit was the magic salve for all problems. Suze Orman even told everyone that the only way to build credit was to have credit cards (which, in hindsight is complete BS as evinced by tons of people like myself, who has a ~740 score having never had a credit card in my 35 years of life, and currently paying both a mortgage and a car loan, both at between 4-4.5% interest with 10% down).

Most of us just didn't care. We were asking increasingly crazier and crazier questions like "about to file bk [bankruptcy], lien on house... would I qualify for a lease on a Hummer H3?" (I kid you not, that was on a messageboard that I was forwarded the link by a friend; unbelievable). But alot of people had similar situations. Suddenly people were driving cars that cost more than 2x their annual salary, and buying a home that was more than 10x the same and not even noticing that it wasn't completely outrageous to do so.

When it all came CRASHING down on them and the banks came to collect after their drunken-sailor grace periods, everyone was already tapped out, rolling debt from credit cards and loans onto new cards and things like that that seem kinda commonplace now even though it's simply mindboggling if looked upon on an individual person-by-person basis.

I've seen this with the boomer generation, I've seen this with their kids (the echoes or Y generation), but it just mostly kinda skipped Generation X, the 30-somethings. Don't ask me why, I'm not a close study of generational attitudes, but I do know what may have triggered it. For the boomers, it was W's spending ways; for Gen-Y, it was watching their boomer parents as well as Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, et al. spend like it would never end. And, they tried to keep up with their cultural peers.

Hey, just a theory :D