GEOFF BENNETT: Americans owe more than a trillion dollars in credit card debt, up 60 percent from just five years ago.

Meantime, higher interest rates make debt even more difficult to pay off.

It's a downward spiral, causing credit card delinquencies to surge.

Our economics correspondent, Paul Solman, explains.

PAUL SOLMAN: For 35-year-old Helena Emenalo, it started innocently enough.

HELENA EMENALO, Owes Debt: My mother had to move in with us.

At the time, it was my husband and I. We had a little baby, and then we had another baby on the way.

The amount of people in our house almost tripled in a very short time span, and expenses tripled as well.

PAUL SOLMAN: To meet them, like so many other Americans these days, she turned to credit cards.

HELENA EMENALO: It's very easy to swipe, and this is an emergency, and everything can be an emergency right now.

PAUL SOLMAN: Before she knew it: HELENA EMENALO: I accumulated about $20,000 in debt.

PAUL SOLMAN: Compared to one estimate of average household debt nationwide, about $10,000.

But it's the most indebted, like Emenalo, who've driven credit card delinquencies to their highest rate in 15 years, bankruptcies up 12 percent in the last year alone.

HELENA EMENALO: Once you start adding all of that up, well, you realize you don't have enough money for day care, or you don't have enough money to pay your electorate bill.

And then all of a sudden, things just get unmanageable very, very quickly.

PAUL SOLMAN: People talk about a debt spiral.

That sound familiar?

HELENA EMENALO: It does.

Yes, it does.

I kind of found myself in, like, an endless cycle of just trying to pay something, even though it wasn't making a dent in the overall amount that I owed.

PAUL SOLMAN: And it's not just millennials and older generation members like Emenalo now caught up in the debt interest whirlpool.

BETH KOBLINER, Personal Finance Guru: It's a huge problem, and it's a specifically huge problem for young people.

PAUL SOLMAN: Personal finance guru Beth Kobliner first published "Get a Financial Life" for young people, now it is fifth edition, 30 years ago.

The early life debt dilemma since?

Worse than ever.

BETH KOBLINER: We have seen the rate of credit card debt for young people go up about 190 percent since 2020.

PAUL SOLMAN: And student debt now near $2 trillion.

BRIDGET CLINGER, Owes Debt: Last I checked, it was approximately $17,000.

PAUL SOLMAN: Twenty-five-year-old Bridget Clinger.

BRIDGET CLINGER: A lot of what I earn immediately goes to trying to pay off all this debt every month.

MAN: Gen Z has more debt than any other generation in history before it.

WOMAN: Let's talk about how much credit card debt I have, and spoiler alert, it is a lot.

MAN: Hey, is there any other 18-year-olds with like $6,000 in credit card debt?

PAUL SOLMAN: And there's a new debt trap for the young, says Kobliner.

BETH KOBLINER: Buy now, pay later is one more example of what we're calling frictionless finance, which may sound great, but it's actually quite pernicious in general, getting further and further away from knowing how much you're spending.

And, sometimes, we don't even realize when we're spending.

In the last decade, we literally have changed the way we have made purchases.

We no longer take out our wallet and use cash and count out the dollar bills.

Nobody does that anymore.

PAUL SOLMAN: Not Helena Emenalo.

HELENA EMENALO: I was doing a lot of buy now, pay later.

And when it came time to pay, I was like, oof, I don't have it.

PAUL SOLMAN: And when that happens: BETH KOBLINER: They say they won't charge you interest, but the problem is, if you're late, you're going to be hit with a big fee.

PAUL SOLMAN: Bottom line, as Kobliner has stressed for decades, if you borrow young, you dig yourself a hole.

MARJORIE SANPIETRO, Owes Debt: With my student debt, my husband's student data, our car loans, credit cards, it's probably like the amount of a mortgage, like, an amount of a current mortgage like $125,000, $150,000.

PAUL SOLMAN: So, folks like Marjorie Sanpietro use credit cards, their interest rates hitched to credit scores.

MARJORIE SANPIETRO: Where average credit card rate is about 30 percent, and that seems frustrating to me.

It's kind of predatory.

PAUL SOLMAN: Thirty percent, which implies a pretty low credit score, and says Emenalo: HELENA EMENALO: If you don't have a good credit score, like you can't buy a house, you can't buy a car.

PAUL SOLMAN: Loan defaults, bankruptcies, and yet another grim economic statistics setting records these days, low consumer sentiment.

Now, President Trump economic adviser Kevin Hassett dismisses its significance.

KEVIN HASSETT, Director, National Economic Council: I actually think that we should stop calling it consumer sentiment and start calling it political sentiment, because the variables really are -- it's really a political variable, not an economic variable.

PAUL SOLMAN: And, yes, says Joanne Hsu, who runs the consumer sentiment survey, the results have been a reflection of which party is in power, but recently: JOANNE HSU, University of Michigan: Republicans actually have been showing declining sentiment this year as well.

And the current reading from may shows both Republicans and independents at their lowest level since the beginning of 2025.

People across the political spectrum, they have been feeling less optimistic about the economy over the course of this year.

PAUL SOLMAN: And, come on, says economist Mark Zandi, the reason is obvious for so many Americans.

MARK ZANDI, Chief Economist, Moody's Analytics: If you look at real disposable income, that's after inflation, after taxes, it's lower today than it was a year ago.

And that's for the -- that's economy-wide, right?

So that means that it stands a reason about half the population is experiencing outright decline.

And so if you have been doing spending in a certain way for a long time and your income starts to erode, what do you -- how do you respond to that?

PAUL SOLMAN: Which brings us back to the subject of this story, consumer debt.

MARK ZANDI: Many people turn to leverage and credit, and the credit card being the best example of that, to help tide things over, but then you get nailed with higher interest rates.

Now you're paying 20 percent interest on whatever you borrowed, and that that's, like, very, very difficult to get out of.

PAUL SOLMAN: And deeper and deeper you may sink.

One final point.

In an increasingly K-shaped economy, who's doing the lending?

MARK ZANDI: The folks in the top part of the distribution, the well-to-do, they own lots of things.

They have the big deposits at banks.

They owned bonds and stocks.

And those deposits and those savings go to providing the credit that folks in the bottom part of the income distribution and the middle part of the distribution are using to finance their spending on autos and on a home and other things.

PAUL SOLMAN: There's an old saw in economics, it's not how much you borrow, but what you do with the money.

If you can afford to invest the money, great.

But if you can't, and have to borrow to survive, you may find yourself, like so many of our fellow Americans, sucked under.

For the "PBS News Hour," Paul Solman.