Most students at Ladue know the drill. Take Intro to Business freshman year, and Personal Finance or Investment Strategies sophomore year. But when you need real life applications? All those terms, quizzes and homework projects are long gone from your memory. Taxes, budgeting, stocks, investments and assets are all things I wish I was more confident about. Personal finance is super easy, but many people aren’t and don’t care to be educated on money. Unfortunately that leads to what we see today, many underprepared Americans forced to tackle soaring college prices and bigger and bigger taxes, allowing billionaires who know the system to use our lack of knowledge to abuse loopholes and get tax breaks.
Tesla, and by extension Elon Musk reportedly paid $0 on taxes in 2025 and 2024. Not because he’s “tax evading” in the traditional sense though. He’s not simply refusing to pay tax, he found a loophole. Instead of assuming ownership of the company, he simply owns the largest share of its stocks and therefore gets a say on decisions as if he owns it. But that allows him to not have to pay taxes on the company. A fact I’m sure many people would be outraged about and rally against if they understood why he doesn’t have to pay tax. Before educating myself I assumed he simply evaded tax and wasn’t punished because he’s so rich and powerful, but this is an issue that can and should be changed.
Donald Trump has been putting less and less money and effort into the Education Department. This isn’t accidental, it’s measured. The less people are learning about money, about government systems, about history, the less bad he looks. And the less scrutiny him and his friends find themselves under.
Talking with my peers and my teachers, we’ve agreed that finance should be taught later on in our high school career. Instead of there being a huge gap from in class to in life application, these classes should be upper classmen built and have the intention to help us with our futures. It’s similar to health class, personally I don’t remember much about health class because I had it in my first semester freshman year. It’s really detrimental because we need that knowledge going into adulthood, but our freshmen selves didn’t care enough to pay attention. I passed the class with a good grade and that’s all that mattered to me. However, the intention to implement any of that knowledge was never there. It’s sad to see so many people looking at education as anything other than a tool, and I think the best thing we can do right now as a generation is take advantage of that to better our personal futures as well as our country’s economy.
