If Privatizing Social Security Is So Great, Why Don’t They Teach Financial Literacy In Our Schools?

Farming Americans for money is all the rage with the top 0.01%.

I see that there are still some people in Congress who think the world of privatizing Social Security. They seem to believe that Social Security will eventually run out of money and that it is not a very efficient means of securing retirement income for Americans. To them, privatizing Social Security would be great, by they’re not very honest about who it would be great for.

Long ago, I read the book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, by Robert Kyosaki, a man on a mission to teach financial literacy to the world, for a fee. Reading that book gave me some enthusiasm for starting my own business. It really did give me hope. Although I never started my own business and kept it going, I’ve tried a few things only to fall back on employment again and again. I guess it was just too scary for me. I’ve taken notice that for most of us, business is just something we leave for others more qualified.

Who are those “other people” who are more qualified? The takeaway I got from Kyosaki’s book, was that rich dads teach their kids business and poor dads teach their kids to get good grades and get a job. Rich dads teach their kids investment and business skills and send their kids to the right schools to learn those skills. Poor dads never learned those skills, so they may not even know they exist.

While participating in a debate on economics in social media one day, I saw that one man said he made the right investments early in life. He had started a Direct Re-Investment Program (DRIP) investment in an electric utility decades ago and was now receiving about $3000 a month in retirement income from it. No doubt this is a smart move. But how many kids now in high school or even college know about this sort of thing? Not many.

It is almost as if personal finance, business and investment skills didn’t even rate as a mention when I went to school. I can clearly recall learning how to fill out employment and credit card applications in high school. But I never saw any kind of business skills being taught there. It was never promoted and it wasn’t even offered. No one ever said, “This is a balance sheet, let’s see how to use it in a business” or, “Today we’re going to learn how to write a business plan.”