Thoughts on Back to School

The kids go back to school tomorrow here in Southern New Mexico. And the teacher unions and their administrators, people who are hopelessly beholden to big government legislators, are firmly in charge. The public education system has been programming the majority of young minds here in New Mexico just as they do all over America for decades.

Coinciding with back to school tomorrow is the fact that thousands of baby boomers across the nation will reach the promised land of age-based benefit qualification. This means they can consume from a list of freebies that are paid for by the government. What this really means is basically these boomers can start passing on the vast majority of the costs of their upkeep to the next generation.

Did we baby boomers pay into the Social Security and Medicare systems all of our working lives? Of course we did. We just did not fully fund our benefits because the politicians our parents and their parents elected were continuously perverting the system so voting seniors were legally allowed to take more benefits than they ever earned. The seniors were really sticking it to our generation when we were younger. And now it is our generation that is hoping to stick it those who follow us.

Let’s go back to the first sentence of this post. A question seems obvious. Will kids who head off for another school year learn how badly their generation is being ripped off by seniors? Surely you jest. Baby boomers never learned this. Generation X never learned it. Generation Y never learned it either. Why should the latest group of unsuspecting American fools be forewarned by people paid to educate them?

Is this situation bad? Like any Ponzi scheme, so long as each generation in a nation can get more than it earns and borrow the rest, it feels pretty good (ask the dead and elderly Greeks). The trouble is some of us actually know how to read balance sheets and income statements. We are trained to recognize scams. And this one is not complicated. Those of us who know how to perform rudimentary financial calculations realized many years ago that our country is moving towards bankruptcy with trillions in unfunded liabilities both on and off the government balance sheet.

Will the public education system do its duty and actually teach kids something relevant about their financial future? Forget it. Teachers and administrators think they are benefitting from this perverse system. And for now…….they are. So instead of educating kids far too many teachers with the full support of administrators will use "social studies" classes to talk about Oprah, Trayvon, the great promise of Hillary, the wonders of Hollywood, the importance of self esteem, the gap between rich and poor, racism, corporate greed, the 1%, and of course that horrible Tea Party that is trying to blow the whistle on all of this madness. Back to school is so cool!