Did you know the United States Treasury has an Office of Financial Education? The mission of this office is to teach Americans how to “make wiser choices in all areas of personal financial management.”

We’ll pause to let the irony of this situation—a federal office advicing Americans on how to manage their finances—sink in for a bit.

Granted, the advice the department offers is quite sensible: don’t spend everything you make, save, etc. The only problem is that our federal government itself doesn’t follow this advice—if it did, we probably wouldn’t have an “Office of Financial Education” in the first place. (The office, which was created in May 2002, undoubtedly cost a few million dollars to start up and a few million more each year to keep running.)

Writes the New Ulm Journal editorial page:

This agency . . . is emblematic of myriad nice ideas upon which the GOP-controlled Congress and the Bush administration evidently felt compelled to spend our money. With no sense of limitations on what government ought or ought not to do, seemingly every nice idea becomes a tentacle of ever bigger government.

This leads me to another excellent thought, this one from Bryce at Blog of Bryce. In a post titled “It Flies Away,” Bryce writes:

Please don’t tell me that Bush cut taxes. I really don’t care. In fact, if one more person reminds me of his tax cuts, I may just scream. You think I should be delighted because tax cuts are lifting the burden from me while concurrently deferring a greater weight of debt to my children and grandchildren?

Exactly. What good are tax cuts if the government continues to spend money at rates not seen since the days of Lyndon Johnson and The Greaty Society? Do conservatives think money grows on trees, and 20 or 50 years down the road we can pluck $100,000 dollar bills off the branches to pay for our government’s annual spending deficits and mounting debt? No; unless a future president and Congress drastically reduces spending—which seems highly unlikely—the taxpayers will once again foot the bill and be burdened with higher taxes than before.

It’s unfortunate that the federal government can’t take its own advice when it comes to spending. Perhaps the Office of Financial Education should be directing its message toward the federal government and not the American people.