Credit card interest rates are usurious. Our mortgage was around 3% while CCs were charging 18% or more. That's just silly.

There was no miracle about supply-side economics. The "miracle" -IMO- has been fueled by federal debt, not personal debt. Reagan tripled the national debt during his 8 years. As a nation, we were living high-on-the-hog on a VISA card. Individually, people were (and are) in deep doo-doo because they can (and do) go bankrupt. They can't print money like govt can. Usury is illegal, and we really should put a stop to that. The only difference between the banks and loan sharks is that the banks don't send people to break your legs. Maybe limit it to some multiple of the Fed rate.

The OP isn't wrong about financial management. They don't teach that in school, even in my day. I had to learn it on my own. Simple stuff like figuring out how much you have coming in vs going out, and how to make the latter less than the former. Reconciling a bank statement. I'd say balancing your checkbook, but checkbooks are an anachronism at this point (1poorkid doesn't even have one...she does everything through Zelle or similar means). If I hadn't found Prodigy -and their finance boards-, who knows where I would be now. (Wikipedia: Prodigy - Wikipedia(online_service)) We mostly used real names in those days, and I owe a lot to the wisdom of folks like Chief Nixon and John Hakemian and Bill Chennault (and many more). (I think I can use the names since we were all featured in a Kiplinger's article while I was in college. Alas, most of them are deceased now.) They were responsible for my money management education, and for me opening mutual fund accounts while I was still a starving student. My first MF was Monetta, in part because they had a low minimum balance (I think $100?), which I could handle. I even opened an IRA (Vanguard).

1poorkid benefited from that, also, because she learned from me. Some of her friends ask her to ask me questions, because they didn't get any of that in school, either.**

**As an aside, all the nonsense about sex education in school has had negative consequences. 1poorkid became the answer girl in her school because she got the information from me. No matter how uncomfortable the question, if she was old enough to ask it, she was old enough to hear the answer. I augmented the "abstinence-only" with actual information. Yes, she had a knack for asking uncomfortable questions, but she deserved the answers. Other parents should be glad for that, because their kids were getting correct information from her, rather than made-up stuff from kids whose parents didn't tell them anything.