Education is free for American schoolchildren, but salaries for teachers are paid for by taxes. They are part of the public “debt.”

However, most of us would agree that the country benefits from an educated population. Isn’t the money we pay for those free schools more of an investment than a debt?

After secondary school, education generally is not free. In fact, over the past few decades, colleges and university have grown beyond the ability of many American families to afford.

Writes novelist Marilynne Robinson: “As state financing fell, tuitions rose, involving many students in burdensome debt. For generations people had, in effect, prepaid their children’s and grandchildren’s tuition and underwritten the quality of their education by paying taxes. Suddenly the legislatures decided to put the money to other uses, or to cut taxes, and families were obliged to absorb much higher costs.” (What Are We Doing Here? Essays)

Learning, Robinson points out, no longer fits into the economic equation.

But, of course it does. It’s one of those long term costs not addressed when only material costs are calculated.

Polluted streams in Montana are a cost passed on to ordinary people. If they drink the water, they will sicken, perhaps die. If the government pays to restore the streams, the costs are passed to citizens in the form of higher taxes. The companies, who mined but did not pay for preventing pollution. get off with more profit now paid for by citizens.

Mariana Mazzucato, author of The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy writes: “For too long, governments have socialized risks but privatized rewards: the public has paid the price for cleaning up messes, but the benefits of those cleanups have accrued largely to companies and their investors.” (“Capitalism After the Pandemic,” Foreign Affairs, November/December 2020.)

Mazzuecato suggests a long term view for our economic policies. Stakeholders in our economy, the workers, who also are consumers, need help to weather economic downturns and again be able to both work and consume.

In these and other instances, government “debt” is more of an investment.