While credit card mailings can be tempting -- alternately offering teaser rates, rebates and rewards -- it's ultimately up to consumers to evaluate whether they are in the position to accept them.

But this way of thinking isn't necessarily in line with how consumers perceive credit card offers.

"There's an aura of credibility and respectability that comes with credit card offers," says Tamara Draut, director of the Economic Opportunity Program at the nonpartisan public policy organization, Demos. "When consumers are extended credit, they think it's because the banks see them as being capable of borrowing, while it very well may be that they are not financially prepared to take on additional debt."

Debt counselors and consumer advocates hear this argument often. "People say, if I can't afford it, why was I offered [credit]," says Jim Tehan, spokesman for Myvesta, a nonprofit consumer education organization. Tehan says that credit card issuers target consumers based on data-mining technology that can only give one part of the picture. "They don't know what consumers can afford -- only a consumer can say what they can truly afford."

But banking industry veteran Walter Wriston, former CEO of Citigroup/Citibank, argues that credit card issuers shouldn't be the ones deciding who can afford what. "Should we say to somebody, say, you're 21 years old: 'You can carry a rifle and fight our war. You can vote in a presidential election. But, unfortunately, you're not smart enough to know how much money to borrow?'"

Stephen Brobeck, executive director of the Consumer Federation of America, rejects Wriston's argument. "Credit is not a right. If you can't afford to pay the debt, a lender has no business at all, and in fact, is irresponsible to extend that credit."

Brobeck uses the analogy of liquor to argue this point: "If the liquor industry mailed out 5 billion small liquor samples every year, what would consumers do? My guess is that 40 percent or so would just throw it out, most of the rest would just save them and use them in moderation, but some, a portion of whom are alcoholics, would collect them and get drunk and bad things would happen."

"The question," Brobeck asks then is "who is responsible? Our response, and the response from most people would be that that responsibility is shared. But most of the responsibility lies with the liquor industry for indiscriminately sending out these samples and that's exactly what many of the lending institutions do with credit cards."

The tendency to place blame on the credit card issuers has become part of the discourse partly because the concept of personal accountability has been diluted, say experts who track consumer debt, "It's quick and easy to blame the credit card issuers, but it's like blaming McDonald's for being overweight," says Myvesta's Tehan. "The credit card industry is not forcing people to buy things. There has to be some consumer responsibility."