Why "A" Students Work for "C" Students and Why "B" Students Work for the Government. Robert T. Kiyosaki
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But financial education, at least in the established, formal arenas of school systems and curricula, is largely ignored. I’ve asked myself again and again: Why is that?
• Could the lack of financial education be one of the reasons behind our financial crisis?
• How much of the subprime mortgage crash was caused by a lack of financial education?
• How many of the millions of families who lost their homes lost them, in part, due to a lack of financial education?
• Could the lack of financial education be the reason why so many people are dependent upon government programs like Social Security, Medicare, military and public service pensions—pensions which are bankrupting cities, states, and entire countries?
• Is the United States—like countries around the world—heading for bankruptcy because millions of Americans need the government to take care of them socially, medically, and financially?
• Is our escalating national debt a reflection of our corporate and political leaders’ lack of financial education?
• Is the United States decaying into the same economic demise countries such as Greece, Italy, France, Japan, England, and Spain are facing?
Welfare for the Rich
We all know there are welfare programs for the poor, but what about welfare for the rich?
• Why do our leaders—the President, Congress, and other political bureaucrats—vote themselves giant pensions and generous benefit packages while the number of families on public assistance goes up? Are our leaders as financially needy as those who rely on the government to meet their most basic needs?
• What would happen if we had leaders who knew how to create wealth rather than just knowing how to spend other people’s (the taxpayers’) money?
• Why do CEOs grant themselves massive pay increases, stock options, and perks at the same time they lay off workers? Are CEOs greedy due to a lack of financial education, or did they go to school to learn to be greedy?
• Did the bankers who lost billions have an adequate financial education?
• Why were millions of employees laid off, and thousands of small businesses closed, while the bankers who caused the crash were paid multi-million dollar bonuses?
• Why do teachers’ unions and government bureaucrats determine what our children learn? What about asking the kids and their parents what they need to learn?
• Why are many of America’s highest paid workers no longer from the private sector? Why are so many well-paid employees, so called public servants, some of the highest paid workers in America today? Why are firefighters and police officers retiring with millions in lifetime benefits? What has happened to government service?
• Who caused this financial crisis?
Today’s financial crises were not caused by poor, uneducated people. Behind the chaos are some of the most well-educated people in the world, people such as Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, a former Stanford and Princeton professor, a student of the Great Depression, but, unfortunately, someone without much financial education or real life business experience.
This book is about education. But not the education taught in our schools.
An Educational Crisis
We are not in a financial crisis. We are in an educational crisis. This crisis begins when our children enter school, spending years—sometimes decades—learning nothing about money and being taught by people who know little about money.
For some reason, our schools have a quasi-religious view about money. Schools seems to believe:
“For the love of money is the root of all evil.”
– Timothy 6:10
Schools ignore the passage that reads:
“My people perish from a lack of knowledge.”
– Hosea 4:6
People are perishing economically due to a lack of financial education in our schools.
Lao Tzu, the Chinese founder of Taoism in the 5th Century BC, stated:
“If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish you feed him for a lifetime.”
Unfortunately, rather than teach people to fish, we are teaching kids the Robin Hood philosophy of economics:
“Take from the rich and give to the poor.”
That’s also known as socialism.
Ultimately, all that this generosity does is create more poor people.
On November 2, 2012 a headline in The Weekly Standard stated:
“Food stamp rolls grow 75 times faster than jobs.”
As expected, the Republicans blame President Obama for this crisis and the Democrats state that Republicans are to blame.
This book is not about politics. It is about education, and about how the lack of financial education is the true cause of financial crisis.
Lag Times
Most schoolteachers are great people. The problem is that most teachers, and parents, are products of the same educational system.
Many teachers are frustrated. Many teachers are pushing for change. Unfortunately, the education industry seems to be an industry that has one of the slowest rates of change.
Different industries have different lag times. One definition of lag time is the time delay between a new idea being proposed and its adoption. For example, I’ve been told that in the world of technology, lag time is around 18 months, the time between a new idea and that idea taking the form of a new product. That’s why competition can become so fierce in bringing a new product to market… and why new companies soon find themselves out of business because someone else can deliver new products or technology faster, better, and cheaper.
Lag times in the Agrarian Age were measured in hundreds of years. Lag times in the Industrial Age were measured in fifty-year increments. Lag time in the Information Age is measured in half-years.
I’ve heard that the auto industry has a lag time of 25 years. This means the new ideas you see on cars today were conceived 25 years ago… ideas such as hybrid cars. And that the business of government has a lag time of approximately 35 years.
The reason many teachers and parents are frustrated is because, among all industry sectors, the educational industry has the second-longest lag time—50 years.
The only slower industry is the construction industry, with a lag time of 60 years.
Notice that the automobile, government,