Reading between the lines.

On a related note to yesterday's small rant over baseball's drug problem: Major League baseball has a list of banned performance-enhancing drugs that, if a player uses, will get him kicked out of the league. So, why would anyone take a supplement that isn't on the list? MLB is telling the players that the stuff they can take doesn't enhance their performance, so why would they waste their money? What's not on the banned list - vitamin B complex and bioflavinoids?

Take the steroids because that's obviously what works.

Meanwhile, when it comes to our mounting personal debt, it seems the blame is with us. Go figure:

Every penny of Americans' nearly $1 trillion in revolving debt started with someone - some individual person - whipping out a piece of plastic and making a decision to use it. We could consider that free will and just call it a day, but there's plenty of reason to believe the story isn't so simple. There are piles of evidence that people are bad decision makers when it comes to how they use credit cards.

Seriously, dude. Try this: "Hey, I'd like to go, but I can't afford it." I think there's some pride that takes over in situations where your friends are doing something that you can't afford, but want to do. The difference between want and need raises its ugly plastic head, and we all want what we don't need, and therein lies the conflict. It's the reason I didn't buy that Kindle I was looking at. I wanted it, but didn't need it.

More than a third of consumers pick one credit card over another based on which issuer has the lowest introductory interest rate. And yet people often do so in a way that leaves them with higher finance charges over time. In one study, University of Maryland economists Haiyan Shui and Lawrence Ausubel watched people pick a card with a teaser rate of 4.9% for six months over a card with a teaser rate of 7.9% for 12 months. That would make sense if the people then paid off their balances within six months. But many didn't - the average balance for the year was $2,500, with plenty of folks paying more in interest charges than they would have had they opted for the other card, considering the rates on each spiked to 16%.

So, you say, "Sure, let's do it," because all my friends have iPods and go to Europe on vacation. I'll go too, and pay for it later. How much later? Well, if you're into the card companies for 5-figures, count on it lasting until you're feet-up in the ground. The average credit card balance is around $10,000. Average. That means that, for every person who has zero there is someone who has $20,000. Try paying that off on those $40 a month payments at 10% interest.

Once we've got our card in hand, our behavior becomes riddled with irrationalities. In one experiment, Drazen Prelec and Duncan Simester of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that people were willing to pay twice as much for basketball tickets when they were using a credit card as opposed to paying cash. Credit-card spending just doesn't feel like real money. In another study, Nicholas Souleles of the University of Pennsylvania and David Gross of the consultancy Compass Lexecon calculated that the typical consumer unnecessarily spends $200 a year in interest payments by keeping a sizable stash of cash in savings or checking while at the same time carrying a credit-card balance. In our heads, the two don't line up.

Our lives are out of control, folks. Credit is too easily gotten. For too long, we've been living fat, dumb and happy until now, finally, it takes an act of Congress to keep the card companies from screwing us blind.

President Barack Obama invited credit card industry leaders to the White House and pushed for reform. He has told Congress he wants a bill before the Memorial Day break. Senator Chris Dodd (D-Conn) said he has been trying to regulate the industry for about 20 years but now is the best chance for reform because people are angry about increases in fees and interest rates as they struggle to survive the recession.

Now, finally - we're angry. Why? Because it's costing us a fortune and we've come to the realization that the debt is too deep to wallow out of, so we turn to legislators - as a last resort - to help us fix a problem that we created. As if they don't have enough to do - fixing problems that they created.

Maybe, what we need is somebody to follow us around and keep track of all this junk that we're buying? Somebody to remind us of how much junk we clutter our lives with.

I'll do it for sixty dollars. Cash.