In addition to teaching kids thrift, I was also trying to improve their behavior. It's pretty hard to control somebody who feels that he has nothing to lose so, first we give him something, then we take it away if he misbehaves. My criticism of today's schools is more about behavior than it is about academics, although the two are frequently intertwined. I don't remember seeing many behavior problems at Sawyer Elementary, but we certainly had our share of them at Gage Park. That improved substantially after the first year when the bad kids turned 16 and were starting to be culled out. Michigan now requires kids to attend school until they are 18, but even before that, they were trying to keep kids in school as long as possible no matter what. They keep preaching to the kids that actions have consequences, but they don't enforce it, so the kids become immune to such admonitions. This provides job security to the counselors, but it doesn't do much to prepare the kids for the real world, where actions do indeed have consequences.
I saved a little money when I was a kid but, by the 1970s, money was depreciating so fast that there was little point in saving it. Conventional wisdom was that you should carry as much debt as possible because you would be repaying it with devalued dollars. Of course interest rates were high enough to cancel out that benefit, but that didn't stop the experts from giving such poor advice, or stop people like me from following it. The only reason I have investments to live on today is that the paper mill closed down and turned our retirement accounts over to us. We were advised to roll that money over into a personal IRA to avoid paying a big tax on it, so I had to learn about investment options or pay somebody else to do it for me.
The amount I received was not nearly enough for me to retire at age 45, so I had to make it grow for at least the next ten years, which necessitated taking some risk. I took a risk tolerance test, which told me that I could tolerate just enough risk to conservatively invest in the stock market, which offered a better chance of sufficiently growing my money than stashing it in the bank. By the time my mother died in 2002 and left me some more money, I knew exactly what to do with it. I could have survived without my mother's money, but it would have been a close call when the market took a tumble like it did around that time, and again in 2009. Mom's money provided a cushion that enabled me to ride out the ups and downs without becoming a nervous wreck about it. I now have about 20% more money than I had after adding Mom' money to the pot, even though I am down about 10% from my last high point a few months ago. The original IRA has a little less than I started with in 1990, but I have been mostly living off of it since then. By the way, I forgot to answer one of your questions yesterday. You asked me if the money I withdrew was replaced by dividends or something. Most of the gains in a stock market investment come from capital appreciation, which means the increase in the market value of the stock over time, although the dividends also help.
As far as what They want us to do with our money, well They should have thought about that before they forced this post industrial economy upon us.
I haven't checked the numbers yet from Super Tuesday but, judging from the sound of your gloating, Trump must have carried the day. The fat lady isn't singing yet, but I thought I heard her practicing her scales backstage.
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