Not because they don’t value programs for young parents and students, but because they don’t trust the government with their money.

We have become so conditioned to thinking of "our money" that we have lost sight of the reality behind that money. It was originally not ours, but the government's and the only reason we accepted it in the first place was because the government used its superior authority over us to force us into accepting it because it levied a tax on us that could only be satisfied in the currency the government held a monopoly on.

The whole purpose of this was to make the people "unemployed in the government's currency". To avoid the penalties associated with non-payment the people had to trade real resources and labor to acquire the unit of measure their government demanded and denominated all transactions in.

This only works if the government spends more into the economy than it demands back in taxation (deficit), otherwise the people quickly realize that all payments made to them are clawed back in taxation and their government is essentially stealing their resources. In any event, the currency issuing government never "needs" your money to enable spending. There is no "infinite+1" in math or spreadsheet accounting. It does, however, need "you" to need its currency, and occasionally have less of it.

What we need to restore trust in government is a government that actually does stuff, and spends money doing it, that benefit the people. That has been mostly lost since '80 when a third rate actor convinced Americans that their government should do far less and that it was "their" money being spent. This is a central foundational block of both neoliberalism and neoconservatism.

It is 180 degrees wrong and is killing our economy by drowning us in private debt to pay for what governments in other countries universally pay for. Taxes are higher (at the federal level) in those countries because they work well enough to always make them cautious of inflation, not to "fund" their benefits.