How is that subversive? It's basic personal finance. It's no more subversive than teaching kids to share toys encourages communism, in my mind. In general, p

How is that subversive? It's basic personal finance. It's no more subversive than teaching kids to share toys encourages communism, in my mind. In general, people shouldn't spend more than they make. If they spend more than they make one month a year, but save enough the other months to cover it, no big deal. I don't see how that's any different at a macro level, but I'm also not an economist. To me it's far worse to avoid having people learn basic personal finance things than it is to avoid it, in case some people apply it to bigger things. We have major debt problems in the population, in my opinion. The housing bubble was a part of it: buying things that one can't afford, with the assumption that prices always go up. Credit card debt being near $1 trillion (I think it's around $800b), college loans being over $1 trillion.... Borrowing has been made very easy for quite some time, but just because money is easy to get doesn't mean that the average person should borrow as much as they can (which is what I meant above when I said that affording minimum payments != affording something). Put those numbers up against the median retirement savings, which are ~$150k for households with head-of-household aged 65+[1, Table 7]. It seems pretty obvious that we as a nation should be educating people to save for their future. I guess another solution, which would be to assume that people can't/won't save no matter what, and use the government to facilitate that "savings" (i.e. increase Social Security's role to the primary source of funds for retirement). That way we wouldn't have to worry about people subverting the system and can just trust the government to do all of the hard work for them. That may match up better with your view, if you find personal finance potentially subversive... [1] https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43057.pdf https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43057.pdf (Edited to fix typo: $8b -> $800b)