I learned recently that PragerU published a video series called Cash Course, all about personal finance, micro and macroeconomics, for teens and young adults. I wanted to watch a few of the videos to see what they were like.

One thing that strikes me is this series's title similarity to Crash Course, which is a well-known educational YouTube channel that covers a wide range of topics, including their own economics playlists. Crash Course is generally well-regarded for its balanced and informative content. They have a course on Business & Entrepreneurship and a course on Economics in general, but I think their most well-known course is US History, hosted by John Greene. The title similarity between Cash Course and Crash Course seems like an attempt to leverage the established reputation of Crash Course, which is misleading right from the start.

I watched four videos in the Cash Course series. Two of them seem fairly harmless, with simple definitions and explanations of economics concepts. The other two videos struck me as having a clear ideological bias, pushing a specific political viewpoint rather than providing a balanced educational experience. The whole playlist is published on YouTube if you'd like to watch yourself: Cash Course | Financial Literacy for Teens & Young Adults. Because half the videos I watched were problematic, this series overall is dangerous. If teachers show this series in class, it could lead to misinformation among the students. Imagine they watch the OK videos, then start to trust the PragerU brand and voice, only to be misled by the propaganda videos later on. There's a real danger here.

Harmless

These videos seem mostly about definitions. They're good introductions to microeconomic principles and ideas.

What Is a Budget? | Cash Course | PragerU Kids

This video is straightforward, explaining what a budget is and how to create one. A comparable video from Crash Course might be Expenses & Costs - How to Spend Money Wisely: Crash Course Entrepreneurship #14.

Making Economic Decisions | Cash Course: Economics

This video covers basic concepts: Opportunity Cost, Marginal Cost, Incentives, and Thinking on the Margin.

• Opportunity Cost - good definition, focusing on choices and value calculations.
• Marginal Cost - good classic definition. Shows how marginal costs change over time. A video from Crash Course that covers similar ground is Marginal Analysis, Roller Coasters, Elasticity, and Van Gogh: Crash Course Economics #18.
• Incentives - having tax as the prime example is OK. They didn't make it political.
• Ceteris Paribus - good definition.

Propaganda

The Risky Business of National Budgets

This video was technically correct on the definitions of surplus, deficit, debt, and government securities.

The metaphor for household budget as a national budget is common, but I find it personally wrong. Maybe this is a college-level idea, but running a deficit is a good thing at a national level. Why did the video skip discussion of the debt-to-GDP ratio concept?

Light political leanings with a desire to lower the national debt. This concept is known to be more concerning when Democrats are in office, but it often gets less attention from Republicans when they have legislative control.

Redistribution: Does It Work? | Cash Course: Economics | PragerU Kids

This was easily the most propagandistic of the four. It pairs accurate textbook terms (including a correct Gini coefficient definition) with sneering asides—calling the math “boring”—and a caricatured government worker, signaling that the lesson is politics first, education second.

The script reduces inequality to individual “skill” and personal choices, erasing structural barriers like racism, sexism, and the compounding advantages of generational wealth. It minimizes proven successes of safety‑net programs—SNAP, the Child Tax Credit, and SSI—by euphemizing them as “transfer payments,” sidestepping the real, measurable reductions in poverty and improvements in health and education those programs deliver.

The video claims redistribution is costly and “rarely” changes outcomes, but it never seriously engages with the evidence that well‑funded programs create durable gains. And they repeatedly use the words "transfer payments" or "government redistribution" instead of the real names like SNAP or SSI. It seems really intentional to avoid popular program names to not remind viewers of social programs that they might like.

At 3:45 they discuss the millionaire tax‑flight myth, which is widely debunked: Millionaires Don’t Flee States Over Higher Taxes. Mobility responses among the ultra‑wealthy are small; if anything, the macro concern is capital flight across borders from corporations and businesses, not a few rich individuals vacationing abroad.

Overall, the video is heavily ideological, steering viewers away from an evidence‑based conversation about inequality and toward a simplistic, blame‑the‑poor narrative. Every example of the poor shows a man begging on the street, reinforcing stereotypes rather than showing real examples of people helped by social programs.

Need to watch

I'd like to watch a few other content creators from other courses. These are smaller creators, with less full reputations that PragerU.

• Next Gen Personal Finance
• Nerdwriter1, How dark patterns trick you online
• Two Cents, 5 ways people are dumb with money
• LearnFree, FOMO, our relationship with social media