Rick Green: 0:12
Welcome to the Intersection of faith and the culture. Thanks for joining us today. I'm Rick Green, America's Constitution Coach, serving here with David Barton and Tim Barton. David's, of course, America's premier historian and our founder here at WallBuilders. Tim's a national speaker and pastor and president of WallBuilders and we're thankful for you joining us today. We really appreciate the fact that there are people all over this country that listen to WallBuilders, that study WallBuilders books and different programs, and they learn that history, that history that has been brought to life but then taught in a way where you can go, do something about it, you can actually act on it, and we're seeing positive results in local communities all across the nation. So thanks for listening, but also for being a person of action. Alright, guys, Steve McDowell, back with us here in a little while. We're going to talk about the biblical economic perspective on this, well, 33 trillion today. I think it's going to be 34 tomorrow, 35 the next day. I know it's not going up quite that fast, but it's getting close. I think we're 33.8 trillion now for a deficit. And, man guys, at what point does it become wheelbarrows of cash? How fast does it just get out of control whenever you allow this much debt?

David Barton: 1:17
This is one of the reasons that history is really important, because when you study history, you also study the economics of nations and you see what works and what does not work. And we're so separated from history now that it's hard to understand consequences without having lived through them. And so we're at a point where we're going to have a generation that's going to have to live through some hard economic times in America because they don't know the history of what happened in France or in England. They don't know the history of what happened in all these other nations who made the same decisions, and they always work out the same way every time. And so that's the good thing of history is you can learn what works and what doesn't work so that you don't have to stub your toe and make the same mistakes. We're at a point now where we're just not able to do that, and people, because there is so much debt personally and credit other things, we just keep spending it. We haven't seen the old axiom as the chickens haven't come home to roost, but they will. And that's what you see from history is it always works out. There's always consequences. You can't avoid them, and so it's really significant. And then, even talking about biblical economics. You know one of the things that I've started doing with groups. I've done it for a little bit, but it's like challenge Christians. Okay, you know the Bible applies to every aspect of life. So let's be specific. And so there's six different types of taxes or economic things that we deal with in America that are also covered in the Bible. And if you ask most Christians where they are, they kind of look at you at the blank face and it's like I don't know. It's in the Bible. Well, if you don't know, then you don't know how to apply. But the six things I can ask about and the Bible either talks about the subject or the title but minimum wage is covered in the Bible Soar capital taxes, capital gains taxes, estate taxes, inheritance taxes, progressive taxes and flat taxes Bible has guidance on all of those issues. There's a lot of biblical economics and people really do need to know that and would keep us from getting into the problems we're getting into a situation right now.

Tim Barton: 3:19
And Dad, even as you're saying that, I know there's sometimes moments we say the Bible talks about this and people go and they look it up and they're like I can't find out the Bible. They look for commentary and they go I can't find that. And so there are some people that would be critical and say that you guys are pretending. Like the Bible says all these things it doesn't say. Well, if you understand what a capital gains tax is, you understand what it is doing. And then go read some of the parables where Jesus talked about to him who has more will be given, but to him who doesn't have, even what he has will be taken away. Well, what does that mean? Because what does a capital gains tax do? It says, based on how profitable your investments have been. Well, the more profitable you are, the more taxes you're going to pay if you try to take that out. And so that's actually the opposite of what Jesus taught in the parables of Luke, 19 of Matthew 25, that those who were the most productive, actually they were rewarded for their productivity because of what they did to get the productivity. And even as we say this, we've highlighted before that, Jesus, if you study the parables in the four Gospels Matthew, mark, luke and John there are more parables that deal with money, that deal with economics, than any other topic. And we certainly could ask the question why does Jesus deal with that so much? And I think that Luke 1611 is such a good explanation of why would Jesus talk about or use money as an example? And it could be because most people right whatever culture, whatever nation, whatever ethnicity, gender, it doesn't matter Most people appreciate money. Most people want to have more money. We can relate on some level to money. Sure that that, maybe, is why Jesus did some of that. But in Luke 1611, Jesus said therefore, if you have not been faithful, and the unrighteous man, that's money, if you've not been faithful, and the unrighteous money, who will commit to the true riches? Who will commit to your trust the true riches? What does that mean Is Jesus said, if you can't be faithful in something that's not that significant, like money, money doesn't mean anything in God's economy, god doesn't need money. But if we can't be faithful in something that's not all that significant, how can God and trust to something that really is truly significant, the true riches of the kingdom? Well, as Christians, we should be seeking the true riches of God's kingdom. Well, what is that? I want the true riches, but if money is one of the measuring metrics, one of the tools that God uses to be able to see, how can we handle what God and trust to us, can we be a good steward, can we be the well done, good and faithful servant, and if so, then maybe we have the true riches. This is why I think sometimes people understand the significance of economics, even as a Christian, and if we did, I think we would even maybe place a greater emphasis on learning to be responsible with money. It's certainly not what we're doing in the US government right now. It's certainly a lot of problems, and one of our good friends, stephen McDowell, is someone who has written about this quite a lot. He's done a lot of research on this and we thought man Stephen would be a great guy to talk to you about this topic for just a little bit.

Rick Green: 6:18
I stay with folks. We'll be right back. Stephen McDowell, our special guest today. You're listening to WallBuilders.

Tim Barton: 6:29
Hey guys, we want to let you know about a new resource we have at WallBuilders, called the American Story. For so many years, people have asked us to do a history book to help tell more of the story that's just not known or not told today and, we would say, very providentially, in the midst of all of the new attacks coming out against America, whether it be from things like the 1619 Project that say America is evil and everything in America was built off slavery, which is certainly not true or things like even the Black Lives Matter movement, the organization itself, not the statement Black Lives Matter, but the organization that says we're against everything that America was built on and this is part of the Marxist ideology. There's so many things attacking America. Well, is America worth defending? What is the true story of America? We actually have written and told that story, starting with Christopher Columbus, going roughly through Abraham Lincoln. We tell the story of America not as the story of a perfect nation or a perfect people, but the story of how God used these imperfect people and did great things through this nation, and it's a story you want to check out, WallBuilders.com. The American story.

Rick Green: 7:31
Welcome back to WallBuilders. Thanks for staying with us. Our good friend Stephen McDowell from Providence Foundation back with us. Website is providencefoundationcom. Providencefoundationcom. Stephen. Always good to have you, brother. Thanks for some time today.

Stephen McDowell : 7:44
My pleasure, Rick, always great to be with you, man.

Rick Green: 7:46
I wish we could get every member of Congress to go through your biblical economics materials at Providence Foundation. We are desperately needing some plumb lines, you know, some guideposts for what works and what doesn't work.

Stephen McDowell : 8:03
I'm in agreement with you on that one for sure.

Rick Green: 8:05
Well, what are we at now? $33 trillion, that is on the books anyway. I guess we got a lot more than that. That's just unfunded mandates. But at this point we're not spending our money or our kid's money. We're digging into the grandkids' money. It seems like.

Stephen McDowell : 8:19
Yeah, this is obviously a violation of what the Bible teaches is really for our good, whether you apply it personally or you apply it nationally. When the people live in debt this is really how our economy today is based on debt, you are destroying the accumulation of wealth and the well-being of individuals and the nation at large.

Rick Green: 8:48
You've taught this a lot the more you go into debt, the fewer decisions you can make. It takes away your decision-making and your choices. I think they're saying now we may be hitting roughly a trillion a year in interest. So if we have to spend that much on interest I mean even though, of course, federal government spending money on things that should not be spending on, that's a whole other topic but when you spend that much just paying on the interest of the debt, not even paying down the debt, you remove the ability to do the things like national defense and the things you need to be doing.

Stephen McDowell : 9:22
You know, Proverbs 227 tells us why we shouldn't live in debt. It says the rich rules over the poor and the borrower is the servant to the lender. Or the New American Standard Bible says the borrower becomes the lender's slave. And of course the Bible teaches we're only to be a servant of God, not a servant to man. And when we live in debt it puts us in subjection to man. And that's why the Bible limits the debt that man can assume. Under the God's law and the Old Testament the maximum length of any loan was seven years, because at least seven years debts were forgiven. But under the New Covenant, which elevates the requirements of the law, the goal is to have no debt at all. Alrights and realms 13.8 owe nothing to anyone except to love one another. Because so debt puts us in subject to man. We become a slave of whoever we're borrowing the money from. And debt teaches us from building wealth generationally, because in the Christian society each succeeding generation should have more wealth than the one before. But, as you point out, if we're borrowing money, then we don't have the money to spend. We're not accumulating wealth. We can pass on our children, our children's children. It's going to the lender, and the way we do things today in our government is actually a redistribution of the wealth from productive to the unproductive is really the practical outcome of what we do today when we deal with our debt.

Rick Green: 11:05
Yeah, and it seems like on that front that when you run up the debt, you almost collectively as a nation, forget what you spent the money on, the transfer of wealth that took place in a previous generation. You just have the debt and you got to find a way to pay it and, of course, it's going to be the productive that have to do that. What do you recommend for us to adopt as basic principles? I mean, obviously not go further into debt. How do you get out of debt when it's this bad? As a nation?

Stephen McDowell : 11:37
Well, of course, when you spend more money than you take in, if that's personal, then you got to borrow money, or you run into problems to clear bankruptcy or something like that. But on a national level, when you spend more money than you take in, here's how we deal that one. You borrow money and you see the national government may do that by issuing bonds or something like that, and of course you have to pay back the interest on those bonds and the value of the bonds. So we'll borrow money. We've been doing that by the trillions. But you can only borrow so much money. So what our governments do today, we create new money. That's what fiat money is. Fiat means by decree, so the government decrees we're going to have more money. How do they do that? Well, open up the printing presses and print more money are really what we do today is put some more zeros on a computer screen and say, while I, we have more money. You can do that because once we established the national bank with the Fed 1913, it was it's able to create the amount of money by the interest rates that they set. And so when you create new money, then you have more money. That's bidding for the same market versus. That's why we have inflation. So inflation is the false expansion of the money supply which comes about because we spend more money than we take in. So you have to pay for that somehow. And so inflation is just the means of redistribution of wealth, the stealing from the productive and those who labor hard and save the cash. And because your amount of money people have is devalued, you can't buy as much stuff because your money is not worth as much because we've created a whole lot new money. So to deal with the problem one, we have to stop deficit spending. If we don't do that, then there's no hope at all, because in the past 40 years especially, we had an exponential increase in deficit spending. That's just spending more money than you take in in taxes. So that has to stop, and we could do that. It's going to be very difficult because we're addicted to spending more money than we take in. Of course it's not just to stop the spending. Then you've got to reduce spending because we have to pay off that debt.

Rick Green: 14:16
And let me just drill down a little bit on the stop the deficit spending thing, because when I first start thinking about this as big a problem as this is, my immediate kind of path I go down is okay, it's just going to be painful. We're just going to have to deal with the pain that comes from making these hard cuts, just like we would have to do as a family or individual. But I also start to think about the fact that the federal government's doing all this stuff it shouldn't be doing anyway and that it's just truly wasteful and that the states could do if the feds would just get out of the way. So while it would be painful, there's also a ton of money there that you could cut. That wouldn't necessarily be painful. I guess it'd be painful to the lobbyist and the federal employees that would have to find something else to do. But maybe that does become painful overall to the economy. But there's also just this jurisdictional issue and this you know just do what you're supposed to do and not all this other stuff. And very few members of Congress talk about that because they don't want to make those constituencies mad. But then and sorry to ramble on you here because you could pick any of this you want to comment on, and then you watch this guy in Argentina that just got elected president, this video that is going around, that I love, of him. You know all those national agencies that kind of like here need to be gone and he's just ripping them off the whiteboard, the little magnets, and going gone, gone, the national whatever, of whatever you know, and I'm like, where is that guy for America? So I mean, what do you think about that in terms of just some big cuts that could be made by just getting back in the proper lane that government should?

Stephen McDowell : 15:48
be in. Well, you're exactly right. There's two thirds of the money the national development spends is outside of your stick, Wow. So you stop that deficit spending. One, two. Then you reduce government spending. How do you do that? Well, you eliminate the welfare state, because 70 to 90 cents of every welfare dollar goes to bureaucrats that don't even go to the needy. So you reduce the paying the bureaucrats. You eliminate bailouts and stimulus programs. We've done billions of billions of dollars of those. You encourage development of infrastructure and private capital, but you also reduce the number of government workers, like the Argentine president's going to do, because right now in the United States we have about 25 million people work for the government Wow, 15% of the total workforce, Wow. Yet yet, remember, government doesn't produce anything. It performs an important function of protecting our property rights, but it doesn't produce anything. You can eliminate this somewhat painlessly. Just don't hire any new people when people retire. I'm not hiring anybody new, and maybe 20% of government workers perform a necessary function. I guess we could argue about that. So, yeah, we could eliminate millions and millions of government workers. We could cut government programs and say, yeah, this is going to hurt some, but if we're encouraging the private sector to be productive, then they can't. They're going to create new jobs, so it doesn't have to be that difficult. That's the great thing about biblical economics it's productivity centered. And so the private sector is the one that is productive, producing needed goods or services and a lot of jobs. And if you reduce taxes, then the private sector is going to have more money for which to create new jobs and there are going to be plenty of work for people to do. But of course, you have to have incentives for people to want to work right now, or welfare state people not to work. So hey, why should I work? The government's going to pay me to do nothing. We obviously have to deal that as well. So we could easily stop that as it's been. Well, I wouldn't say easily. You're right, there's going to be pain, but we could stop it. We could reduce government spending and we could shift to a really a free market, a biblical economy wind, hurt and harm. But we could eliminate how difficult it would be if we just take the proper steps. But it seems nobody is willing to do that.

Rick Green: 18:28
Is it a? I guess at this point we watch the swamp in Washington DC and there's a, once in a while, a bright light of hope that there's somebody there with enough common sense and biblical knowledge to bring back these principles that work? Is it a situation where maybe the pain does have to get so big that people will make the decisions, the tough decisions, that whether it's the inflation, interest rates, whatever I mean do we have to have another misery index of the late 1970s to get a Ronald Reagan?

Stephen McDowell : 18:58
Well, it obviously with the more and more government workers. Government workers have an incentive not to eliminate their jobs. So you gotta put people that have principles inside. We're going to take the steps. We're going to stop government spending. Do something like the penny plan, you know reduce just one penny out of every dollar the government spends. We're not going to hire any new people During this time. We're going to reduce taxes, too, because reduction of taxes generally gives more money to the productive sector. But it it's here's the problem our government is only reflecting what the people do. Yes, our government's $33 trillion in debt, but the private sector, I think you know we've got over $4 trillion in mortgage debt. We have over a trillion dollars in credit card debt. So we have huge amounts of debt ourselves personally, and so our leaders just reflect what individuals are doing anyway, because economics began in the household. That's what primary definition of economics is is household management. So we've got to deal with what's in the heart of the people. Then we'll get rulers who have a understanding, conviction. Yes, we're going to take the necessary steps and the people will support them to to reduce the size of government. So it's going to take people of character and people of a proper worldview to pull this off.

Rick Green: 20:33
Yeah, and that fits with Really everything else. You know it is the local solution that we can do something about and the way you just described that, I love that, because you know we see these big budgets and this deficit and all this at the national level and we go what can I do about it? Well, we can do more about it in our own households first, and then teaching our kids to do better at that and the people in our church and encouraging that at the local level. Like you said, if we do it and then people will recognize, like if they aren't even being taught this personally and living these kind of biblical economic principles out in their own lives, they won't recognize when government's doing it the wrong way. They'll just think, like you said, you know we're doing it, why wouldn't government do it? It's reflecting and we're getting the government we deserve. So it does start with us, is what you're saying. I mean, we got to get better at our own decision.

Stephen McDowell : 21:17
And when we recognize living debt free is liberating. See that I've lived with debt and I've lived without and it's much more liberating to live without debt. And we have to recognize I will sacrifice now so that in later years I will have great liberty and a greater accumulation of wealth and I can pass it on to my posterity. But a lot of people, they just want to live it all. I want to have it all now. So we need to drive old cars, we need to not get any debt at all and if you have to borrow money, you should only borrow it for items that appreciate and value, like a home. Don't know the ball of money for a car, just buy, you know, a cheap car that'll get you to work. I mean, so you're sacrificing. But then as you look down the road or unless you live this out, you say I'm debt free, I'm not a servant and slave to any man. Then that will transfer to recognizing hey, it's going to be the best for our government too, because you know we want to accumulate capital in the nation overall and that's going to produce a huge increase in future generations. Man.

Rick Green: 22:34
I love it Again. I wish we could get you in front of every member of Congress, but what we can do is get you in front of more of our audience, get people to take this into their homes and teach it in their homes. So many good materials are Providence Foundation dot com. Providence Foundation dot com. Stephen McDowell. God bless your brother, Always love having you and look forward to getting you back to Patriot Academy next summer as well.

Stephen McDowell : 22:56
I get to be with you, rick. God bless you.

Rick Green: 22:59
That was Stephen McDowell. Thanks, stephen, for joining us today, back with David and Tim, all right guys. So I mean Stephen makes it sound so simple, but it really is right. Like God's ways are not complicated, I mean he lays it out for us. We just tend to want all the things that we want and don't listen to his instruction.

David Barton: 23:17
You know, I was listening to Steve as he's going through the stuff and talking about debt and, by the way, I just looked up on the line of what he was talking the average debt of Americans, what the individual America owes. It is such a difference by generations. If you look at Gen C, or millennials, or Gen X, or baby boomers, or silent generation, it is such a difference. For example, with Gen Z, the average debt for Gen Z is about $26,000. But if you go to Gen Y, which is millennial, the average debt is $116,000. I mean, what a huge difference per person. If you go to the silent generation, which is the oldest the great grandparents it's about $40,000 at that point. So there's a lot there why this debt occurred. What happens with that? And there were some things that were kind of really strong. I mean, I'm going to hit them real quick. But one, ecclesiastes 18, says the eye is not content with seeing. And what happens is that's why window shopping is a bad idea. When you see something, you want it, and the more you see, the more you want, which is why advertising works. When you see things, it causes you to want something and you may not need it. So the other verse that goes to that Hebrews 13.5,. It says keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have. And so a lot of debt comes because we're not content with what we have. We see an advertisement. The eye is not content with seeing. We want more, we want something greater. Another economic principle economics 428,. It says work, so you will have something to give those who are in need. So that's the other thing is, when we're looking at money, we need to also be looking at people we can share that with, that are in need, not spending only on ourself. And I think those are all principles that Steve was talking about. But those are just Bible verses that hit me. Hey, don't be selfish with money. Look to be able to make something to share with others. Be careful about what you see, because that will lead you into spending it more debt. And be content with what you have. Learn to live in the lifestyle where you can live even below what you need to.

Tim Barton: 25:13
And, Dad, as you were saying that those verses and even some of what Steve said, it reminded me so much of this is a lot of what Dave Ramsey has been saying for a lot of years. Like this is not complicated and you might disagree with. You know, if you're listening. You might disagree with some of what Dave Ramsey does or doesn't say. That's fine, but the reality is this Dave Ramsey has made himself like a chagillionaire from telling people basic things like hey, don't spend money you don't have and try to pay off your debt and have a savings account and then live generously, give money away. Like these are not complicated principles. And yet what Steve pointed out is it's become a problem in America because we don't live our lives inside of the boundaries the Bible would give guidance for and therefore we've allowed the government to get so far outside of what is healthy. This is something that it's a problem. We have to definitely get a control for the federal government, but it means we have to start with ourselves of saying let's make sure we do the right thing in our own lives with following this biblical guidance when it comes to money.

Rick Green: 26:13
These principles apply to us personally. They apply to us as a nation. God's principles are not only right, they work best. You know, I know we say it all the time here on the program, but whether it's economics or it's how we treat our family or how we form our society, how we treat our neighbors, Gods ways work best and their right. So it's both of those things. Thanks for listening today, folks. You've been listening to WallBuilders.