5 Vital Economics Lessons Your Kids Won’t Get in School
4. Public Finance
While children are taught the basics of our political system, they aren’t taught about the financing of those systems. I was in my 20s before I grasped the concept that all government money was taken from the productive sectors of the economy through taxation, and that the bigger and more costly government was, the less money would be left in the private sector where it creates profit, jobs, and prosperity. I wondered why I wasn’t taught this, then I realized a government employee had been tasked with my education.
While government is necessary, if we assign government too many roles in civil society it does two things: first, it hinders the private sector from being able to fill those needs and secondly, it drains too much money from hardworking Americans.
Right now our federal debt is above $16 trillion. This sum of money is simply unfathomable to many Americans. Every year our government grows, and every year it wants more money to feed that growth. When it doesn’t get the money, it borrows it, mortgaging the future of Americans young and unborn, so we can have a giant, ineffective, wasteful government today.
Is it any wonder young voters support large, expensive government programs when they don’t have a grasp on the debt or how government spending drains the economy?
