I don’t think it’s surprising that a study put out by a company which helps people save and invest money to make money would conclude that people are saving or investing enough money, but neither is the idea that people aren’t saving enough money for things like college very surprising either.

And for that last bit I blame entitlements.

Think about it, why else would people be neglecting to save for their kids’ futures?  Could it be that they’ve gotten the idea from certain pandering politicians that college education is something their kids are owed and that they don’t really have to worry about paying for it because the government will provide it for them anyway in the form of grants and subsidized loans?  I think it is, and I think that same sense of entitlement in other areas of life is why Americans aren’t saving that much money in general.

That’s what entitlements do to a society.  They weaken it, and they make citizens less reliant upon themselves and more reliant upon the government.  Some politicians love that because they can manipulate that reliance in order to extract votes from the citizenry (see: agriculture subsidies, minorities), but for individual citizens it isn’t a good thing.  Nor is the massive tax burden these entitlements create for taxpayers a good thing for our country as a whole.

America became a great country not because we created a government to provide us with the things we need but rather because we threw off the trappings of onerous government and created a system that stayed out of our way so that we could provide for ourselves.  Over two centuries from that revolution, though, it seems as though far too many Americans are willing to bring back that onerous sort of government for the sake of things like Social Security benefits and prescription drug entitlements.

Which, frankly, isn’t a trend we should be proud of.