how much crap can people buy?

And American's total net worth is less than zero for the first time since the Great Depression, or some statistic like that which they quoted. The answer to the question is that we can buy up to the limit of the credit that banks are willing to front us, which I'm guessing is right about at the limit. Lots of poor people don't recover from their Christmas shopping debt for a full six months, and that's just on top of the debt that they always carry. They'll never pay it all off, and the banks don't want them to. Making the minimum payments and a bunch of expensive late payments means that the interest they pay on their purchase debts will easily be ten times the cost of the stuff they bought. It's not that far removed from slavery.