RSSSay What?
October 4th, 2007 | View Comments
I’ve some time to kill before the next item on my schedule and I thought I’d spend a bit of it relieving the relative depressing-ness of the front page of the blog right now.
There was a minor news item last week that caught my attention. Hillary Clinton proposed said she liked the idea of a baby bond program, in which every baby born in the US would get a $5000 government bond to help buy a house or pay for college. The idea is apparently to help encourage people to save money.
Erg…what? I must be missing something because I have no idea why this is a good idea once you get over the “Whee! Free money!” knee-jerk. I can’t decide if she a) is pandering, b) can’t do math, or if c) I slept through the magic wand waving that made sure every baby born in America will have a working knowledge of economics and personal finance by age 18 so they can make that $5K work for them instead of blowing it on stuff or stashing it in a 0.3% interest-bearing account where it will slowly lose value against inflation. I guess the UK tried something like this. Is it doing anything?
I’m as sympathetic as the next liberal to the idea that we should help disadvantaged children get a leg up in life, but I guess I’m a weird kind of liberal in that I generally don’t favor just handing out cash. Give a man a fish, feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime and all that.
I just feel that a much, much better way to encourage saving and financial prowess would be to say, fund any of these teacher proposals over at Donors Choose (speaking of which, Tomato Nation readers raised over $60K for Donors Choose in 4 days, which is nothing short of awesome), or to support a program like BUILD which teaches business and entrepreneurial skills to low-income students.
But maybe it’s just me.
In the meantime, it’s about time for me to get ready for my next thing, which is to go hear Suzanne Klahr, founder and CEO of BUILD, speak.
Yvonne posted this on October 4th, 2007 @ 4:19pm in Charity, Education, Graduate School, News/Politics | Permalink to "Say What?"
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2. Elenita » October 6th, 2007 at 10:17 pm
I’m thinking her motive is really to create “demand” for bonds and theoretically increase their value (in the non-monetary sense) in the short- and medium-terms. It’s not really about increasing savings (although that could be a fringe benefit) but about injecting some momentum in an essentially stagnant source of funding for the US government.
Of course, it could also have something to do with the fact that the US dollar has lost a good deal of its luster and this might, theoretically. make foreign investors less Euro-, pound-, and yen-happy, but I tend to read international finance into everything that neoliberals (i.e., in the international sense, not the domestic one) propose.
I’m also really tired. So take this with a spoonful of salt.
1. Jane » October 4th, 2007 at 5:13 pm
I think this is just a case of politicians taking advantage of short term knee jerk reactions (”Yay! I want my free $5K”) while taking care of their true hidden agendas while everyone’s too busy blowing their dollars shopping.