This is absolutely an educational failing. We barely cover taxes in school. At best it's said once in a class, gets covered in a minor question on a test and if we get it wrong, no one notices. "We" probably still got a B on the test without any CLUE how taxes work.

Yet here we are, dismantling any nationwide effort to make education better.

A LOT of people think 99,999 tax is 27,999 and 100,001 is 29,000, even on the democrat side. If those charts are accurate, it's probably damn close to 50% of US citizens.

[–] Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca 4 points 7 hours ago (3 children)

I seriously don't understand why we don't have a mandatory class that covers taxes, T4 slips, investing, labour laws, budgeting, reading nutritional information on foods, etc.

[–] LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

It was all covered in my Florida education. For the most part it is just a very small amount of information that people tend to forget it. It also isn't all taught in one class. (T4 slips are called W2 forms in the U.S. for those questioning). The investing thing is a broad generalization though. I assume because it may get considered an overlap of teaching kids to gamble. Everyone was required to take either micro or macro economics in high school though for us, both of which touched on stock market invement mostly just tied to the idea of a 401k (retirement accounts).

Nutritional labels were covered in science classes multiple times, but we're touched on in middle school science, and we were all required to take a home ec class for half a year in 7th grade which taught about it as well. Again in physics and chemistry classes.

W2s were covered in our mandatory typing class as a form of data entry, because most people only take the data from boxes off the W2 and enter them into a tax program. Then the tax brackets were taught to us in middle and highschool.

A lot of it to me is that we don't pay attention in school and forget a lot over time. Nutritional and Tax bracket questions were on both the ACT and SAT. Which are national tests required to get into colleges.

[–] SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world 2 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

WTF is T4 slips

[–] Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca 4 points 5 hours ago

Ah, sorry I slipped in some canadian

[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 3 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

The nutritional stuff is like 6th-grade science, about the time you should be burning peanuts with a Bunsen burner.

I've seen a few schools that have an elective financials class, but I think they're still trying to balance checkbooks.

The problem is it's just one class, and nobody takes classes seriously in high school. Most of them have forgotten the things that they used to know when they were 20, 30, or even 40 years past their education.

It's like we need some kind of driver's ed test but for living

edit: 6th grade, no fire in elementary school

[–] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 hours ago

I have never been invited to burn peanuts with a bunsen burner. Showing the relationship between chemical energy and thermal energy and the sometimes surprising differences between foods?

I think we had too much separation between diet classes and physical science. I think I recall doing something like a puzzle, with physical pieces, where you tried to make a days food using different foods. The point was that it's easier and you get more if you pick the healthier foods. Instead everyone knew what the point was and then fucked around making the dumbest possible meal that fit the defined criteria.
I seem to recall the teacher not being amused with my solution that only has one food group per meal. (What's for breakfast? 9 eggs. Lunch? 3 unseasoned grilled chicken breasts. Dinner? Six baked potatos, plain)