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Consider these statistics for a moment. 62 percent of college seniors have four or more credit cards. That's not a typo. Four or more. Crazy, right? With an average balance on these cards of more than $4,000 these seniors are entering the real world already saddled with hefty credit card debt.

For our Children of the Recession piece airing tonight on the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, I interviewed Shanetta Francis, a recent graduate of Trenton High School in New Jersey who could not wait to get her hands on plastic.

"Because I heard so much about credit cards and how they raise your limit and you can get black cards and gold cards or platinum cards and I was like I cannot wait until I turn 18," she told me.

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Mark Knoller is a White House Correspondent for CBS News.

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With no fanfare and little notice, the national debt has grown by more than $4 trillion during George W. Bush’s presidency.

It’s the biggest increase under any president in U.S history.

On the day President Bush took office, the national debt stood at $5.727 trillion. The latest number from the Treasury Department shows the national debt now stands at more than $9.849 trillion. That’s a 71.9 percent increase on Mr. Bush’s watch.

The bailout plan now pending in Congress could add hundreds of billions of dollars to the national debt – though President Bush said this morning he expects that over time, “much if not all” of the bailout money “will be paid back.”

But the government is taking no chances. Buried deep in the hundred pages of bailout legislation is a provision that would raise the statutory ceiling on the national debt to $11.315 trillion. It’ll be the 7th time the debt limit has been raised during this administration. In fact it was just two months ago, on July 30, that President Bush signed the Housing and Economic Recovery Act, which contained a provision raising the debt ceiling ...

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