On a Sunday night in August 1971, Richard Nixon interrupted television across the country to give the American people some economic news.
He'd spent the weekend up at Camp David with fifteen of his advisers—his Treasury secretary, the head of the Federal Reserve, a young official named Paul Volcker who'd go on to run the Fed himself. They'd been working on something big, in secret, and hadn't told America's allies or, really, anyone.
That night Nixon looked into the camera and announced that the United States was "temporarily" suspending the dollar's convertibility into gold.
It's worth pausing on what that sentence actually meant, because it sounds like accountant talk, but it was actually one of the most consequential things any president has ever done to your wallet.
Up to that night, the dollar was tethered to something real. For decades, under an agreement struck at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire back in 1944, the U.S. dollar was pegged to gold at thirty-five dollars an ounce, and foreign governments could walk up to the window and trade their dollars for actual metal. That tether was important. It meant the government couldn't just print money whenever it wanted, because every dollar was a claim on a limited pile of gold sitting in a vault.
The gold was the leash, and it kept the printing honest.
Nixon cut that leash.
He framed it as a bold move to protect the dollar from "international speculators," and he used one specific, reassuring word to describe it.
Temporary.
That was fifty-five years ago this week. The window never reopened.
So what’s happened in the years since Nixon removed the only thing stopping the government from printing as much money as it pleased?
Let’s look:
In 1971, the national debt was under 400 billion dollars. Today it's at 40 trillion and climbing. That's not a typo, and it's not adjusted for anything. It's the raw number that went from hundreds of billions to tens of trillions in a single working lifetime.
A dollar from 1971 has lost the vast majority of its purchasing power. Depending on how you measure, it’s somewhere north of 80 percent. The candy bar, the gallon of gas, the down payment on a house—the price of it all has kept climbing, not because those things got more valuable, but because the money got worth less.
That's what happens when you loosen the tether. They just keep printing more money, and every time they do, the dollars already in your pocket buy a little less.
Of course nobody voted on this dollar-untethering. There was no referendum on abandoning sound money. One powerful man simply went on television one Sunday night, said the word "temporarily," and rewired the financial foundation that every American family has been standing on ever since.
Most of the people watching had no idea what had just happened, and most people today have no idea it ever happened.
And that, right there, is the problem.
This is exactly the kind of thing that determines whether your kids get to build a stable life, and it's also the kind of thing they will never have explained to them in school. There will not be a class on why their paycheck doesn't stretch as far as their grandfather's did, or what "fiat currency" actually is, or why a government that can print unlimited money tends to, or who gets hurt when it does.
It does not benefit the powers-that-be to teach these things.
A kid who understands how money actually works—where it comes from, what gives it value, and what happens when a government prints it without restraint—is a kid who grows into an adult that can't be easily robbed. Who hears a politician promise to pay for everything with no cost to anyone and instantly thinks: wait, where does that money come from, and what's it going to do to the money I already have?
That's not a cynical kid. That's a free one.
We wrote a book about exactly this. The Tuttle Twins and the Creature from Jekyll Island takes the story of central banking and money-printing and turns it into something an eight-year-old can follow and (as crazy as it sounds) actually enjoy. It's based on a book by G. Edward Griffin called The Creature from Jekyll Island. Most adults haven't read it (although they should!).
Jekyll Island is part of our Back to School sale, which is still live. It’s the biggest one we run all year, with up to 70% off most of our best resources:
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Back to School Bundle — $119.88 (total value $419.44). All 14 children's books, plus every workbook, parent guide, and audiobook.
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Family Starter Pack — $229.95 (total value $870.72). Everything above, plus all three volumes of America's History with the full curriculum.
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Mega Bundle — $529 (total value $1,371.20). The whole library, including the teen guidebooks and Choose Your Consequence novels.
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Business Basics Grade 3 — $39. The new financial literacy and entrepreneurship course for 8–9-year-olds.
Nixon called it temporary because "temporary" was easier to swallow than the truth. Fifty-five years later, the temporary measure is just called normal, and almost nobody remembers it was ever supposed to be anything else.
That's how it always goes.
The big things get changed quietly, on a Sunday night, while everyone's watching something else, and a generation later nobody even remembers there was a better way.
Unless somebody tells the kids. That’s on us.
— Connor
