Very disappointing that a large enough percentage of fellow citizens . . . are suspicious of something as straightforward as a simple contingency fund? ? And it's not lack of intelligence, not by any stretch. It's more lack of any kind of frustration tolerance and willingness to make the effort to think things through, and admit things are complicated, and try new things in medium steps and see how they work out.Rather than have a obvious savings or rainy day fund astute city administrators will fudge around with the next years budget and sandbag extra funds inside project accounts and roll the surplus around to another pending project. Locally the Tea Party member of the county council was lacking in any business or basic bookkeeping knowledge so he never caught on to what he was looking at in the county budget/finance reports.
And plus, it's that we teach George Orwell's Animal Farm in school, about governmental tyranny, as well we should teach. But that we don't also teach books like Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, in which corporations have far too much power, there's a thin, fig-leaf government, and many of us live as serfs. At least not when I was in public school back in the 1970s. It would have been considered too edgy and controversial.