Consumer debt and a lack of financial intelligence is putting our country at serious risk. In a recent New York Times column, David Brooks made that point with chilling clarity.

He points out that the United States has been affluent since its founding, but until the past few decades, had remained “industrious, ambitious and frugal.” He writes this about lotteries: “Here is the government, the guardian of order, telling people that they don’t have to work to build for the future. They can strike it rich for nothing.”

He also observed a dangerous shift in values, writing: “[Benjamin] Franklin made it prestigious to embrace certain bourgeois virtues [of hard work, temperance and frugality]. Now it’s socially acceptable to undermine those virtues.”

Click here to read the full text of the column.