Beginning of Essay
Our nation is in dire financial straits. However, the nation's situation is only a reflection of our personal failures in our inability to "Just Say No" to ourselves. We must have everything and we must have everything now. We have become a country of consumers i ....

Middle of Essay
.... the same ruinous path. Many students come out of school not knowing how to balance a checkbook. College is where you start learning firsthand about finances and credit because the credit companies are sending out cards by the buckets to students. Citicorp just spent ten-million marketing credit cards to high- school kids. Sixty-one percent of all college students are carrying a card, and thirty-two percent of those got it before college. However a recent survey showed that fewer than thirty percent of the students polled could say what interest rate they were paying on their cards. It's like not knowing anything about guns and toting an Uzi ....