A-E-I-owe-you: What America is teaching our children
America truly is the home of the free and the land of the brave, but we’re also a nation of debtors, the biggest of all being the U.S. Government’s almost 11 trillion dollar and growing deficit.
Something I’ve learned from my time as a father and a teacher is that children learn by example. We model the behaviors we desire to see in our kids, whether that is honesty, hard-work, courage, or caring, but the pendulum swings both ways, we also will see bad behavior when our children pick up on our bad examples, whatever they may be. So what have we learned from our government’s bad example? Is it really so hard to believe why Americans don’t mind borrowing more than they can afford?
The newest lesson our government is teaching Americans; borrow more to save yourself from financial disaster. That is the example Obama’s stimulus plan is making for us and most especially our children, who will learn about it in U.S. history class someday. Now, I’m not saying that all borrowing is bad, sometimes a calculated investment can provide high returns, but it sounds to me like our government is trying to pay off their school loans with a credit card. This is a big “no-no” when it comes to debt because school loans usually have a lower fixed interest rate, while credit cards tend to have extremely high and unpredictable rates. This is a situation no caring parent would ever want their child to be in, but we see these bad money management decisions growing in popularity and why not? The U.S. government is doing it. If something as big and powerful as the United States government can do it and be “ok”, then why can’t I?
The solution requires our government to be a positive financial role model. As Obama has said and not yet done, we need to balance our budget and only pay for things we can afford. How he can say that with a straight face while promoting an over indulging stimulus bill is beyond me, but at least he recognizes the problem, it’s more than can be said for other presidents. My prediction: when our top governments officials can work together to facilitate a sound money system we will then see a generation where proper money management is the norm.
Photo: President Obama signs the American Recovery and Reinvenstment Act of 2009.
Comments
By drew on March 12th, 2009 at 9:05 am
Good point Dan. The government is setting a poor example to our youth, but I believe that a young person with no credit history and an inert capability to extort taxes from a large workforce would certainly be insane to justify their irresponsible borrowing on the “big and powerful” US Government. You are comparing big and powerful to a weak and very limited individual.
PS I’m one of those weak, limited individuals