Antonio and Wesley Todd dissect Social Security's impending insolvency, labeling it a flawed Ponzi scheme exacerbated by Doge's fraud cuts and preferential benefits for Cuban and Haitian migrants. They argue federal welfare atomizes society, replacing biblical family responsibility with unsustainable state dependency, while proposing local control and direct generational wealth transfers to counteract inflationary redistribution. The hosts further contend that modern tax structures penalize productivity, urging Christians to conditionally support families without enabling sin, ultimately framing current economic burdens as a result of abandoning traditional intergenerational bonds for expansive, diverse safety nets. [Automatically generated summary]
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Social Security Interest Erosion00:14:52
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We need this content for the glory of God to reach more people's ears.
Is Social Security biblical?
Short answer no.
Tune in now.
Now, we don't want to disparage anybody, but we wanted to go ahead and make sure that this is as simple as possible to understand.
So, we're going to explain Social Security as though the listener was only five years old.
And to do so, we've decided to invite for this task a special guest, Michael Scott.
Tune in now.
Raise your hand if you want to get rich.
All right.
No.
How is this not a pyramid scheme?
All right.
Let me explain it again.
Phil has recruited me and another guy.
Now, we are getting three people each.
The more people that get involved, the more people who are investing, the more money we're all going to make.
It's not a pyramid scheme.
It's not even a scheme, per se.
It's.
I have to go make a call.
And there you have it.
Social Security, in many ways, is a classic Ponzi scheme in the most technical way possible.
We're going to break it down for you, and then we're going to basically break this episode into four segments.
We're going to try to do our best to explain what Social Security is, although Michael Scott has already done a bang up job.
So, what is Social Security?
And then we're going to talk about some of the problems with Social Security, and then we'll talk about some of our short term and long term predictions, more so short term, because It may not last as long as some of us may think.
And then we'll talk about biblically speaking what some of the alternatives might be.
So we have Antonio and Wesley Todd in the studio with us today.
Wesley, I'm going to turn it to you first.
Do you want to take a crack at explaining a little bit about what Social Security is and what the system is it's made up to try to fund all these elderly people?
Yeah.
So Social Security comes out of the New Deal.
This is 1935.
And what you have to understand about the 30s, really the late 1920s leading into the 30s, Is the Great Depression.
I mean, this is, it was worldwide, correct?
So many nations across, due to crises in banking, this is one of the failures of central banking.
There was a run on banks and ultimately just not a lot of faith in the financial system.
You could put all of your wealth into money, but honestly, that money's not worth anything.
Like you could work 40 years and have all your savings, but if the thing you hold it in goes up in smoke, you literally have nothing.
And so you had just across the United States, across the world, a large crisis of faith in financial institutions that led to widespread unemployment, widespread poverty.
I mean, there's stories, I remember.
Members of my family talking about how their grandparents talked about eating groundhogslash woodchuck, depending what you call it in the region.
Like, you're that poor, like, you're here, even in the United States, less than 100 years ago.
And what's for dinner?
It's like, well, it's the, it's kind of the roadkill that we shot out back because we're so hard up for food.
The unemployment rate capped it, I think it was 30% unemployment.
Like, think about that 30% of your workforce just unemployed.
They couldn't find work.
And so, out of that, President Franklin Roosevelt, one of the big pieces of legislation that helped address that was.
The New Deal, and a big part of that was trying to form a type of safety net for individuals that are older.
We were talking about before this episode, but what do you do when you have two people competing for the same job?
One's 50 and one's 25.
Well, the 50 year old is at the disadvantage.
The younger guy can work more hours, he has more energy, he's probably better able to learn.
An individual that's 50, practically speaking, unless they have a lot of experience in a field, and when it comes to manufacturing or physical labor, like how far does experience really go, especially if it's strength related, he just doesn't have a chance to.
So, individuals that are older were really struggling.
And so, Social Security was designed and envisioned as this type of safety net.
And originally, it was designed to run off of just payroll taxes.
And so, a small percentage, right now it's about 6%, 12% total, but 6% from the employee, 6% from the employer, 6.2, 6.2.
And that totals up.
They pay about 12% into it.
And those payroll taxes then go ahead and provide a safety net that at 65, you can begin taking Social Security.
So, whether it was you came into unfortunate circumstances and you were poor, or honestly, you just didn't save, we'll talk about this in a little bit.
Like, what do you do when your populace is kind of dumb and they don't think about the future and they're not putting money away and they're not envisioning?
Like, men, if you work a manual labor job, there will come a time where you can't work that anymore.
That is just straight up physics.
That is the laws of aging.
And so, for all of those reasons, we have Social Security.
Now, Social Security, a lot of that money, there's different parts there's disability, there's trusts.
We started eating into the trust, I think it was 2010, around that time.
And we were going off of some of the interest that it made.
So, if you think of an investment, you have the principal.
And then you have the money you earned on that actual investment.
We started eating into the interest about 15 years ago.
Well, now we're eating into the principle of that.
We're getting to the point that it's estimated between 2030 and 2035 that Social Security is not going to be fully paid out.
That's straight up.
If you are fully eligible for Social Security, you're 65 years old, you might only get 80% of your payments because there's just practically not enough money to go around.
And so you can kind of see how it started as hey, here's a way to help because our economy is terrible.
And we have seniors and we need to care for them.
We'll talk about the biblical precedent for caring for your father and your mother and those that are aged in your community.
So it started off as that, but as it's ballooned, As individuals that don't deserve Social Security, namely those that have not worked here and labored here, immigrants, very recent immigrants, as they've pulled from it.
Now we have this massive system that's taking millions and millions and billions of dollars for American taxpayers and what they're getting out of it and what they can count on, zero.
Yep.
Yep.
Antonio, any thoughts?
Yeah, I mean, it's so it's like obviously welfare is like a classic third rail sort of political topic.
And so you can imagine, based on what Wes just described, like legislators are kind of in a catch 22.
Because they have seniors, so you imagine your senior sort of constituents, particularly for Republicans who sort of are granted more of that, like, you know, 55 plus voting populace.
These are the people who are expecting or currently benefit from Social Security.
And with things like inflation, right, the power of the dollar, the power of your payments that you receive from the Social Security administration, they actually weaken through time.
And so, as a Republican legislator, You're in this position where, okay, part of my constituents are saying, hey, I want more payments from or increased payments from Social Security.
And then you have the younger populace, which is saying, hey, I'm not even going to benefit from this thing.
And by the time I'm old enough to take out of Social Security.
And so you're stuck with even Trump saying, hey, let's decrease taxes on Social Security payments, which worsens the problem for insolvency.
And then this is how you've got, over the last 80 years, you've really just gotten to this.
Terrible cycle of increasing payments for Social Security beneficiaries without increasing taxes because nobody wants to increase taxes.
And that's where we're at.
We're 10 years or so from insolvency.
Look at this chart from the 60s of our Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security spending.
Astronomical.
I swear every chart of any spending ever is just infinitely up.
Like, you guys have to get that.
Like, these systems cannot go on forever.
I mean, look at that.
We're up to, if you're listening, we're at about 2.5 trillion.
This is still from a couple of years ago.
I mean, you're talking.
Not even a tenth of a trillion in about 1960 in real spending power.
This is what it goes up to 2022.
It goes up to massive amounts.
This graph is from again about like seven years ago or so.
Medicaid is another big one in there.
So, Medicaid is for adults that can't afford, so their income is below a certain level.
They can't afford health care, so the government comes in again and provides health care for them.
That type of spending is increasing too.
I remember sitting down, she was a lobbyist in New York, and it was for the job I worked for, and she told us just about All the healthcare lobbying and everything.
It's this massive patchwork system of duct tape and zip ties and fixes.
Because all these hospitals, they've increased administration costs, but practically they're not getting the funding.
The state is saying, guys, we've got to cut costs.
We can't give money to this rural hospital, this rural hospital.
And ultimately, what you're going to see is kind of what you see now.
It all just breaks down here and it breaks down there.
Your social security is not paying enough to keep mom and dad out of a home or out of losing their house.
It's kind of a slow decline.
We all imagine like this apocalyptic nuclear end.
Also, late stage empires, the decline could look like this.
Spending, you can't afford anything.
If you're young, you can't get in a home.
If you're old, the systems that you counted on to be there simply aren't.
That's what we're in the middle of.
Yeah.
And this kind of issue is exacerbated by the demographic collapse that we're seeing, right?
Where you see the baby boomer generation, they're getting older, they're starting to draw from Social Security.
There's not a strong enough economy or a solid enough young working population to support that in perpetuity.
And welfare programs like this require that.
That is a prerequisite that you have more people working than people benefiting from the safety net.
And we're looking at a case where that won't be true.
And we're not in a position to deal with it, frankly.
Yep.
A little bit of good news.
The macro picture is still quite bearish, but we did have some recent news that we just had the biggest drop, monthly drop on Social Security payments.
So, not what's going in, but what's actually going out.
So, if we want to show this as a tweet, it says breaking.
After major efforts to cut waste and fraud, Social Security handouts just saw the largest single monthly drop in history and basically went down from, it's hard to read, but yeah, basically went down to a little bit under, I assume that's in the millions, right?
Billions.
Billions, good grief.
Billions.
Okay, so it was getting real close to 170 billion and then dropped to 154, or I'm sorry, 1700.
Yeah, yeah, a little bit below 1600 billion.
So, Yeah.
But this drop, like just look at it, and this is what the Department of Government Efficiency, Doge, one of the things they came in and said look, there's people that are 150 years old taking benefits.
Now, what of course that is is the kids or the grandkids or family members or caretakers not reporting the death and still continuing to collect the benefits.
So it's a bloated system.
And we got a little bit.
So they went in and cleaned it up.
What does that account for of that graph?
10%?
7%.
So the system's run away.
But don't worry, it dropped by 7%.
Right.
Good, helpful, but not enough.
And with these programs, too, it's like you can do all of the work of going in and identifying fraud and cutting some of the staff.
I think 7,000 employees from the Social Security Administration were cut.
That's like 12% of the workforce.
You can do all of these, going back to Wes's point about band aids, because that's what they are, but we're not really fixing the system fundamentally.
Like, in other words, we have eradicated the fraud that exists today without any structure to prevent fraud.
From happening in say five years or 10 years.
And so, again, while it's, you know, we're optimistic in the short term, there's still a lot of things that we have to sort out.
Yep.
So, we do want to get to some scripture and how to care for the elderly and some of these things, how to plan for the end of your life when you are inevitably elderly.
But do we have any more charts or graphs you want to show, Wes?
Someone asked a great question 2022 and 2023, what was with the increase?
So, if you look at that graph, Again, you can notice a pretty sharp increase.
This again correlates to 2023, 2024, even getting into a little bit of 2025, your Q1.
What accounted for that?
Well, fascinatingly, a lot of scrutiny has been on the Haitian and Cuban migrants.
We, of course, during the election, remember when Springfield, Ohio, a little small town, they're like, hey, we're practically being overrun.
There's these people coming into the park, taking our geese, beheading them, and eating them raw.
There you go.
Eating them raw.
But, and there were reporters that went down on the ground and, like, yeah, we have certifiable video evidence.
These people barbecue.
People's pets in the back lawn, in their backyard.
Here's another factor of this.
According to the provisions that the Biden administration allowed for these certain immigrants, some of these immigrants were eligible for these benefits after just a year in the United States.
The normal waiting period is five.
So, if you come in, you apply for citizenship, you could begin to be eligible for these things within five years.
But right here, I have on the screen the terminology, the definition.
The term Cuban Haitian entrant refers to benefit eligibility rather than immigration status.
Individuals who meet the definition of CHE may be eligible for certain public benefits.
You can see there all of those different things that they're required for.
But basically, within a year, a lot of immigrants, because remember, a lot of them, like they're older.
I think Antonio said the average age is what, 47?
47.
Yeah.
So, immigrants come in.
Some of them are, of course, younger than 47.
Many of them are older, and a lot of them are eligible within one year to begin to take benefits.
So, some of that certainly, baby boomers getting older, more people taking their retirement.
They say, hey, COVID happened.
I'm done working because you can delay taking Social Security and get more per month.
So, if you retire at 67, you get a couple hundred more per month than if you retire at 65.
But here's another big one 20 to 30 million people who shouldn't be here who were given a status that allowed them to drain the savings of Americans for the last 50 years.
Americans have poured.
Their hard earned money into this building for their future when they're older and when they need it.
And then you have Haitians and Cubans who are coming in and within one year contributing nothing to our nation and taking the benefits.
Biblical Compassion for Brothers00:15:39
It's absolutely insane.
It's suicidal.
Okay, let's go ahead.
Is there anything else or can we get to some scripture?
Because I want to deal with what does the Bible say about this idea of social security?
Let's do it.
Okay, go ahead and pull up the first verse.
All right.
So, we talk a lot about the three domains, the three spheres of sovereignty that God has assigned the home, the church, and the state.
And there's certainly areas where they overlap.
For example, the government has an interest in marriage and recognizing a couple that's married versus unmarried, a child born out of wedlock.
But the church also officiates that wedding.
They also recognize the individuals.
And even the family has an interest in this.
So, it's not as though the church, the state, and the family are these clean spheres with no overlap whatsoever.
They intersect.
And there's times where the family and the church are both involved, the family and the state are both involved, the church and the state have to work together.
But within these three realms, the home, the church, and the state, there are specific duties that some have and not others.
And so, listen to this from Deuteronomy 15, 7 8.
If among you one of your brothers shall become poor, you shall not harden your heart or shut your hand against your poor brother, but you shall open your hand to him and lend him sufficient for his need, whatever it may be.
The Bible definitely starts with, and we'll make an argument, we'll talk about the state as far as charity later on, but most certainly the first duty of charity, the first who's responsible, all right?
There's somebody poor.
Deuteronomy goes and says, Hey, this is you at an individual level.
It doesn't say, if your brother is poor, take him to the assembly to receive a handout.
If your brother is poor, take him to the temple.
It says, If your brother is poor, actually, you have a duty.
You have the means.
So, right there, when it says, You shall lend to him sufficient for what he has.
Jesus says elsewhere in the Gospels that you should lend without receiving payment back.
So, now in there, with lending, I think there's an expectation that they would pay back, but also, and you're not charging usury, but also you should probably not lend so much that your family's impoverished, and it's assuming you have the means to do so.
And especially when it comes to the household of faith, 1 Timothy talks about this.
The most important thing, the first line of defense for sure, is the family.
Do I have a brother?
Do I have a cousin?
Do I have an uncle?
And they need help and I have the means to do it.
Right.
When it comes to the welfare of the populace, the first fail safe is the family.
So you see 1 Timothy chapter 5 talking about caring for widows.
And the first thing that the Apostle Paul says is that before a widow is listed on the roster to be cared, she becomes a financial liability of the church.
You know, you should see does she have a son?
Does she have a brother?
Does she have an uncle?
Is there a man in the family?
And then this is, you know, first century.
And in that context, it's pretty countercultural for the time.
But he even mentions does she have a daughter?
If there's even a female member of the household, right?
That it should go to a male first, a son or an uncle or a brother.
But if there is, you know, not only does she not have a husband, but you think of Naomi, right?
Like where she's off, you know, among the Moabites because there's a famine in Israel and she not only loses her husband, but.
Also, she loses both of her sons.
And so, if there's a situation where there's no male family member, not just the husband missing, but an uncle or a brother or whatever it may be, that this responsibility would fall even on a daughter or a sister, a woman in the family, before it becomes a liability for the church.
And then, even if it does, let's say she's got no one in the family who's able to provide for her, so it's the family first, but then there are strict requirements as it pertains to.
The church.
She has to meet a certain criteria for age.
Younger widows, Paul says, I encourage them to marry if they're younger.
If they're older and they can't remarry, if they're older than the age of 65, which is listed there, then they can be added to the roster.
But it's not just that.
It's one, she can't have any member of the family, male or female, that can meet the need instead of the church.
She has to reach a certain age bracket.
And then beyond that, you know, unable to remarry.
And then beyond that, there's spiritual qualifications.
So those are the practical, physical qualifications.
Qualifications, but then the spiritual ones are Has she washed the feet of the saints?
Has she been faithful?
Right?
So, the raging feminist, you know, does not, you know, it even says Has she reared children?
It's one thing if she's infertile and was unable to conceive, it's another if she voluntarily, purposely chose not to have children because she painted her hair blue and wanted to be able to go, you know, rage and, you know, in feminist and LGBT rallies.
Well, if that's the case, Then there are consequences for that.
And it's not because we're trying to be mean, but it's because the church, Christ who is infinite, is the head of his body, which is the church, and the church is finite.
The church here on earth, the visible church, has limited people, limited resources, all those kinds of things.
And so if you can help all, right, we could go to other texts in scripture.
I believe it's Galatians.
It says, as often as you have opportunity, do good to all, but especially, that is, prioritize.
The household of saints.
So it's not that we don't want to be kind to those who are hurting, but because our resources as people and as Christians, the church is finite and limited in its resources, often we have to choose.
We have to triage and decide, you know, we can only help one person, but there are two people currently standing in front of us who both have need.
And so then you're taking into account the practical qualifications.
Well, is this someone who's over the age of 65?
Is this someone who has no family member who can help them?
In order to relieve the financial burden on the church.
And then, if you have two people who meet the physical criteria, then you have to go and pan out and say, all right, spiritually speaking, one of them doesn't have children because they died in war.
The other one doesn't have children because they voluntarily chose to forego childbearing because they were a raging feminist.
And we can only afford to feed one, so the feminist starves.
And it's pleasing to God.
It is pleasing and good and biblical and right that if you can only feed one widow, And one is a Christian and one's a feminist, the feminist starves.
All right.
So, first, the first, you know, free safety when it comes to welfare, when it comes to poverty and need is the family.
Second, biblically speaking, is the church.
And the family has to do that same calculus.
If you have an uncle that's a drug addict and you have your children and you make $25,000 a year, you have to say, My kids matter more.
That's right.
I'm sorry.
Now, if you have the means, you have $250,000, you got someone down in their luck.
That is a different calculus.
But practically, even the family will have to say at times, I can't do it and I'm sorry.
All people are finite.
Resources are finite.
We have to triage, we have to prioritize.
And so then we want to do it biblically and not in a way that's arbitrary.
So, all that being said, going back to that verse, if we can pull up Deuteronomy again, I wanted to draw out just a couple things with this.
So, one, He says, if among you one of your brothers should become poor.
So, in this context, it's not talking about biological brothers.
This is beyond just the family, although it's not more really, you know, it's not other than the family.
It's just the family writ large.
That's what nations were supposed to be.
Nations would always have some measure of mitigated immigration.
So, all nations, you look back through history, they're all in flux.
Nations are fluid, but not that fluid.
They're not supposed to be as fluid as, you know, modern Western nations are today.
So, granted, yes, a nation could change over the course of.
A couple centuries as some people come in and they assimilate.
Even in America, we've had different touch points of fluctuation with immigration, whether it's the Italians coming in or the Irish coming in, but there would be an influx of immigration, and sometimes it would be a lot, but then there would be breathing room, right?
We would have pauses, and those people would assimilate in.
And so, at first, when the Italians show up, there's a pretty big difference between all these Anglo Protestants and the Catholic Italians, and they're not really getting along, and the Italians are starting mob.
Crime syndicates in New York and ruining cities and stealing all this kind of stuff.
And you have to go in and crack a few Italian skulls and get things in order.
And now, in hindsight, it's like, okay, so and so is an Italian, and technically I'm German or technically I'm Swedish, and tomato, tomato, right?
So eventually, yeah, well, we've been here.
Your family's been here for 10 generations.
Mine's been here for 14.
We're both Americans, right?
Our grandparents have fought in the same wars.
We both celebrate Thanksgiving.
We both, you know, we're Americans.
But my point is, every nation is in flux.
But there is a way of being absolutely insane when it comes to immigration, which is what we have currently opted for.
So, going back to the verse, if among you one of your brothers should become poor, this is in reference to Israel.
So, it's not just biological brothers, but it is the family writ large with the nation.
And what this is assuming is that there would be people in Israel who are not their brothers, not their fellow Israelite brothers, right?
So, not biological, the immediate family or extended family.
But also, not universal, not just everyone's my brother.
No, it's national.
It's speaking of the nation, it's speaking of the ethnos of the Israelites underneath the old covenant.
So, there might be this many sojourners or immigrants who are in Israel at a given time.
They shouldn't be exploited, they should be treated with respect, and they also should behave as guests.
And the immigrant is expected, even if he's not a worshiper of Yahweh, he can't have idols in the Israelite camp.
He can't break the Sabbath.
Well, I don't believe in the Sabbath.
Well, tough.
You're going to observe the Sabbath outwardly.
I can't make your heart change.
Only God can do that.
But you can, you do have control over your outward manifestations and behavior.
And you're in our country, our country worships the Lord, and these are his commands.
And so you're going, if you're going to be here, you're going to abide by that.
So there were, at any given moment, immigrants, sojourners in Israel.
But here's the deal if it's a brother, meaning not the immigrant, but a brother, someone who was a fellow Israelite, if he should become poor, You shall not harden your heart or shut your hand against your poor brother.
So, right here, again, it's triage.
There are levels of compassion, right?
There are verses that talk about the sojourner too, right?
So there are concepts of not harvesting your grain all the way to the margins, that's to the edges of your field, but leaving room for the sojourner among you to glean in your fields.
Now, notice even that when it comes to the sojourner gleaning, notice that even that isn't you should leave some of the wheat already harvested and sheathed and set up in bushels for him to take.
No, what you're leaving him is not just, you're not just leaving him a handout, you're leaving him a job.
I'll say that again.
You're not just leaving the sojourner, the immigrant I'm speaking of now, a handout.
You're leaving him a job, meaning there's more work that I could do to get the maximum capital out of this investment my field, my labor, my property.
But I'm going to leave the margins.
And what I'm leaving is I'm leaving it unharvested.
And somebody else is by hand now going to come in without the resources, without the oxen, without the servants, without this and without that that I have, and by hand, think of Ruth.
You know, she goes into Boaz's fields on the margins, and she's now, she has resources, but she has to work in order to get them.
But in the case of a brother, back to Deuteronomy, somebody who's a fellow Israelite, in this case, there's something to be said for lending him.
You shall not close, shut your hand against your poor brother.
So there's an extra degree of compassion.
It's not just leaving him a job, but you're actually giving him a handout.
But even there, the word lend is specific.
Now, it's true that Jesus talks about forgiving the things that we loan.
Within reason, not to the point of suicide.
But in this case, under the old covenant, you would lend and there would be an expectation that it would be paid back, but it wouldn't be with usury.
There would not be the allowance of being able to charge interest.
Now, Israel could actually charge interest to a sojourner, to an immigrant, to someone who was not their national brother, someone who's living in their nation, abiding by their laws, behaving as a guest, and you're treating them with respect, but you don't.
Owe them a handout.
And if you do give them a loan, you're allowed to charge interest, but you're not allowed to charge interest from your brother.
So the expectation is that you could not just leave a job, right, the edges of your field to be gleaned, but you could actually give him a finished product.
You could actually give your brother, if he's your ethnic brother, a handout, but there would be an expectation that you're lending it.
So it's not just a gift, it's going to be paid back.
But because he's your brother, it does not have to be paid back with interest.
You should not charge him.
Interest.
This is one of the ways that Israel handled the poor.
That's ultimately what we're talking about, whether it's the elderly poor, whether it's the disabled poor, the sick poor, or, you know, there's all different kinds of reasons for being poor.
But, you know, Jesus himself said, the poor you will always have among you.
Any functioning society, no matter how healthy it is, you can certainly have a society where there's less poor by good governance and these kinds of things.
But every society, no matter how healthy it is, will have the poor.
And then the question is, How to deal with them.
And under the old covenant for Israel, there were different categories for okay, well, who's poor?
Am I related to them?
Are they family?
Okay, then I have a huge obligation.
Okay, the next would be are they beyond just my immediate family or extended family?
Are they in a broader sense now kin?
Are they actually fellow Americans?
Or is it someone living in America, but they're a Haitian and they've been here for six months?
That's a different calculus.
And so working out, but the point is that it starts with the family.
And then the citizens writ large, but still as goodwill offerings, not coercion.
And then beyond that, for Christians, it would be the church.
And then the last kind of fail safe that you would eventually consider is the state.
Now, we've reversed that.
That's the main point I want to make in this segment we've done it completely opposite.
The first thing that we consider when somebody is down on their luck, whether it be elderly or sick or disabled or whatever it is, the first thing that we turn to is the state.
And we have very few qualifications whatsoever.
Many people are on welfare, not because they got hit by a truck.
And they're quadriplegics, and not because they're 98 years old and can barely get out of bed.
Many people are on welfare because they're high as a kite, they're doped out of their mind.
They're drug addicts, they're criminals, they're lazy, they refuse to work and get a job.
And yet the state is providing for these people.
So we start with the state instead of starting with the family, then looking at individual citizens, and then moving to the state.
We start with the state, and we don't just give to the poor.
Who are actually downtrodden, but we give to the poor who are poor for good reason because they are being sinful, because they're being wicked.
Coffee Supporting God's Kingdom00:03:44
So let's go to our first commercial break and then we'll come back and we'll talk a little bit more about the Bible, but we'll also talk about some of the specific problems with our current social security system, some of our predictions of what we think will happen, and then maybe discuss some alternatives.
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So, as we think about the problems with Social Security, and I think particularly the consequences of it, I think what, you know, as we observe what Scripture has to say about sort of individual free conscious, you know, free conscience, I should say, sort of lending and supporting of family and supporting of community, I think what becomes evident as you think about Social Security is that it's fundamentally replaced the biblical imperative there.
So, it's like, You know, you could frame it, and I think it was framed particularly in the mid, you know, these kinds of welfare programs in the mid 20th century were framed as sort of supplementary to natural activities of the church and natural activities of the community.
But the clear consequence is that, you know, as the state sort of rushed in and supported the elderly and supported the disabled and veterans and things like that, the individual responsibility and the imperative sort of was sort of abdicated.
Yeah.
And so, you know, you look at society now and you say, hey, well, I can diagnose it.
We live in an individualized, atomized society.
We don't see intergenerational households.
We don't see people asking their family for money, right?
There's an actual societal shame to say, hey, dad, can I have some money?
You know, good friend, uncle, whoever the case is, I'm in a bad spot.
Can you give me some money?
Can you support me in this way?
There's shame there, but there's no shame in leveraging the state to do the very same thing.
Right.
That's one of the most pernicious things the state does when it gets involved in things that it shouldn't.
So, for example, Medicaid.
How many people have now offloaded their medicine to a shot, a pill, and a doctor's visit instead of saying, hey, my health is mostly my problem?
Blue Cross, Blue Shield got to start here in Texas.
And it's something like $5 a month.
But what that was intended as is, hey, your leg got cut off at work.
We're going to take care of you.
Like, this was not for, we give you your well checkups, you get a flu that you come in, you've become obese, that leads to health issues, we come in and handle it.
It was a good safety net, and I think a good thing.
A type of health insurance program where, say, a hospital has to take you on for two months.
Well, that is practically speaking going to cost.
It's going to cost a room.
It's going to cost staff.
It's going to cost expertise.
It's going to cost money.
We as Christians shouldn't be opposed to some type of program where the cost is distributed, especially if it's voluntary.
Hey, I voluntarily pay $250.
And so, in the case that I require $250,000 worth of care, I'm able to be cared for and I don't go bankrupt.
But when that program started happening, and especially your Medicaid and Medicare, And people get on it.
There's literally a case from moments ago where we can see how people are very reluctant to give it up.
People start saying, like, and they're going to handle all of it.
And I'm going to eat terrible.
I'm not going to exercise because they've got it.
And ultimately, where the money's coming from?
Like, that's the other thing.
Well, it comes from the government.
We all have this perception the government has infinite money.
Now, practically, of course, it's limited, but they themselves even are just printing dollars.
What would it look like for us to say, I understand these programs are here as a safety net?
Mature people can do this.
I understand it's a safety net, but it's not at all a replacement for me, for the most part, taking care of my brother, taking care of my aging parents, taking care of my own health.
And it's funny because literally just happened with the big, beautiful bills.
This is the bill working its way through the Senate.
There was a vote to Stop illegal aliens from being eligible for Medicaid.
So, if an illegal alien came in, they said, Hey, I don't have money to pay this, there is an eligibility of Medicaid that exists there.
And it was voted down.
Now, some of that was due to the parliamentarian making the threshold for the votes approving at 60.
So, 54 voted for it, you're 46 or whatever against it.
But even there, we struggle as a nation to even say, Hey, you're here illegally.
I'm sorry, you can't take our tax dollars.
We've given them out, we give it out, we give it out.
And people, once they get their hands on it, They do not want to give it up.
Same thing when it comes to responsibility.
How many people are obese?
Hey, you have got to take control of your health.
We know for sure obesity is going to destroy your quality of life.
It's going to destroy your length of life.
Please go on a walk, eat some veggies, cut the soda out.
Best I can do is a two week stay in the hospital.
I'm not changing any of my habits.
That's what the government did when it subsidized a lot of these things.
On tax pay, you see, like the consequence of people receiving benefits, and it's like, You know, hormone replacement therapy.
It's like my actual production, my actual individual sort of ambition is, you know, dissipated by receiving this.
But more than that, there's also, I mean, you could get very tactical on the problems with the way that these programs are structured.
Like, I can paint a picture.
Imagine you're a single mother, you have two children, you're on some, you know, various forms of welfare, food stamps, whatever the case is, and you make, let's say, $50,000 a year.
Let's say the threshold's $50,000.
In that case, with two children.
The moment you make $50,001, what happens?
You lose it.
You lose it.
And so, what's your incentive?
Your incentive is actually to stay on healthcare.
And so, we see these systems designed to function for the same individual in perpetuity, which makes them fundamentally unsustainable.
Right.
That almost seems like the promise of America was it's a lot riskier, but your upside is greater.
Like, it felt like a lot of it, especially in the early frontier, like you can go to California and you could make a lot of money, more than you would have made in the old world.
But you're also, you're roughing it.
You're in California, you're competing with everyone else.
But in America, once you got that IV drip of the government money and the government safety programs, we lost the edge that made us ambitious.
Like, how many men, like men of working age, they're on some type of disability, some type of welfare.
They're very content to stay at home and to play video games and to not really care about their life.
Whereas if you literally said, hey, you're going to starve, you're going to be hungry, hungry, hungry.
My goodness, some of these guys could get a job next week.
It would be incredible.
We removed all of that incentive.
By creating too broad of a safety net that doesn't apply to people who need genuine help.
They are out there that do need it.
And there's even, I think we could argue, we could talk about this, sometimes the state does step in when those other two have failed.
But practically, when you spread it way wide, people lose the edge.
They lose the ambition, especially men.
And you can, it makes sense, right?
Like the government, just by design, the state by design, cannot, can't do it very well, I should say, hand out imperatives to people.
It's really difficult to subsidize behavior.
And that's like, that's demonstrated not only here in America, but all across the West.
And so, but you can imagine the inverse.
Imagine you're receiving support from your local church or you're receiving support from your local, you know, you could say your family even.
There is an imperative that comes with that aid, right?
It's that, oh, I ought to do something appropriate.
Because you know that person.
You know them, it's personal.
And so we actually see the inverse happening with this faceless, and, you know, you say Uncle Sam, but like the reality is, people view the government as impersonal.
They view it as this nameless, faceless thing that cuts them a check.
And with no imperatives, with no strings attached.
Yeah, they can remain anonymous.
They don't have to have their head hang low in society and public.
Whereas if it's something that's known, like if your whole church is making that decision, maybe it's the deacons of the church that actually make the executive decision, but the church is informed and not in a way that's humiliating, but they are informed.
The church knows that so and so is currently going to be on the roster for benevolence for the next three months.
In order to cover their housing or something like that because they're out of work and looking for a job.
Everybody knows that.
And so you're powerfully motivated to rectify that situation as quickly as possible.
But if it's a federal system nationwide, then yeah, you're going to Walmart and buying candy bars with impunity.
There's no shame attached.
You're anonymous.
But the reality that people don't recognize is that.
Although there is this anonymous factor, Uncle Sam has never given anybody anything.
Because Uncle Sam doesn't produce anything, he doesn't have anything to give.
So all these people, whether it's welfare or Social Security, whatever it is, they're taking money from you.
And if the government prints money, then by way of inflation, they're taking money from you.
And that's to me, that's the biggest problem with the system of Social Security there are people who pay millions of dollars into Social Security.
But we'll.
Because what's the cap, Antonio, annually?
I think it's $168,000 is the cap that you would contribute for one person.
So you imagine if you're making.
Total or for a year?
That would be for a year.
So 12% of that person's contribution to Social Security would be $168,000.
So any dollar that you make more than that, you're not contributing.
But, you know, vice versa, when you retire and you seek to draw from Social Security, even if you were at the cap of contribution, you aren't.
In other words, it doesn't scale proportionally.
Right.
So you could give $128,000 for 20 years of high earnings.
You make, say, $10 million a year.
You're giving, giving, giving, 12%, 12%, 12%, just going into Social Security.
And then when you get out, you're not pulling an equivalent amount.
Well, certainly not an equivalent amount if you had invested that in the market and gotten an 8% return.
Right.
You're not even taking out what you put in, much less factoring in for compounding interest and time and all those things.
And in that way, it's definitionally.
Wealth redistribution.
Right.
Like, definitionally, you're taking from those who have and giving to those who have not.
And, but I did want to add one thing as we talk about sort of individual ambition, you know, we hear a lot of noise about sort of the widening wealth gap.
And I think one consequence, in my opinion, one consequence of Social Security is actually that in and of itself, right?
You have people who are, let's say, working class, lower middle class, they benefit from welfare programs.
And in that way, that individual ambition is destroyed.
And if you're a higher income earner, what you see is well, you're taxed a lot.
And so your drive is to make more money to make up for what you're taxed.
And you see this like widening gap.
And so, I mean, it's not like self evident that that would be the case, but I think there's strong evidence that that's the consequence.
Yeah.
Now, here's an interesting thought experiment.
So we have America, 360 million people divided among 50 states.
Obviously, there's bigger states that are more populated, smaller states that are less populated.
Stephen Wolfe got in a lot of trouble for this, where he said, Okay, let's not think of America, 360 million people, a massive continent spreading from coast to coast, very diverse, tons of different people in it.
But let's imagine somewhere like Norway.
I think the population is about five to seven million.
It's a very small geographic area, and it's very homogenous.
It's the same type of people that have lived there.
People would typically stay in their town or the city that they've lived in.
With these types of programs, I'd be interested in what you guys think.
With these types of programs, where it's a small percentage, and it's a small percentage because to what we said earlier, You know one another.
So these are a group of people that have kind of the same diets and the same habits.
They're less Western, so there's less consumerism.
There's less of big corporations coming in and mass producing cheap food.
So you have a healthier population, a population that's very similar, a population that ages together.
You have grandparents and grandchildren kind of staying in the same area.
When you have something like that, and then you say, hey, at 2% of people's income a year, we're going to have a type of medicine that's universal.
So healthcare will be universally paid out.
Program for those that are low earning, or maybe they weren't able to have children.
Does that kind of change the variables when you're going to a much narrower group of people that are kind of healthier?
And then, as far as taking from the paycheck, you're not talking 12%, but you're talking 2%, because the actual cost of maintaining it is a lot smaller.
How does that change the calculus?
Yeah, well, I mean, the variables are certainly different.
You're going to pay a lot less and you're going to get a lot more back.
Part of the problem with America is that diversity is not our strength.
That's part of the problem is that we have a wide gap.
Economically, between the rich and the poor.
And part of that is complex, but part of it does have to do with that we have all different types of people from countries and many from the third world, from all over that have filtered into our nation quite recently by the millions and millions, even tens of millions.
So it's certainly a much more complex problem here.
I think even Even for it not to be national, but to be by each individual state, would probably immediately produce some level of improvement with the system.
Because think about, for example, Vermont and Texas.
Practically speaking, homeless people, if you're going to have to live outside, it's a lot easier to do it in Texas.
So, Vermont, in their policies, they could look at it and say, hey, we're going to be a little bit broader with the eligibility for people that have lived in the state this long.
We're not going to have housing requirements, this, that, or the other.
Texas goes in, they say, Hey, we have a lot of transients, a lot of individuals, so we're going to have longer residency requirements.
We're going to require you to prove residence in a certain place for a certain amount of years.
Hey, I've had to have lived in this county for five years.
So the individual states are much better to even parse applications and people that say, Hey, I really need the help than a federal government across all 50 states, including Hawaii way out there, Alaska way up there, and say the same standards and the same criteria apply to all of you.
The local in the particular is often a lot better at handling that and setting the requirements for it.
Grasshoppers, Ants, and Anarchy00:07:13
Yeah.
Another challenge is just like what Antonio was saying earlier, but the breakdown of the family, the fact that we're atomized.
It's all about, you know, used to the, you know, the basic building block of society was the household.
But now it's down to the individual, the individual person.
And families are fractured, and not just emotionally or relationally, but families are in a geographic sense all over the country.
You have this sister who lives in California, and that brother who lives in Maine, and the parents live in Kansas.
And so you have families that are spread out all over, and we've grown used to this way of life, this individualized, atomistic way.
Of life.
And so the family, which is the primary backdrop when it comes to physical welfare of a society, is already fractured and severed and divorced from one another.
So that makes it incredibly difficult.
And so to go back, that's the hardest thing that I think of it.
And also, we just have a massive portion of our population at this point.
We just have to admit part of this is because of immigration and a bunch of people who shouldn't be here.
But even among our native citizens, we have, like, we have fallen quite far.
And so, what I mean by that is, we have plenty of people that it's not just that they're not rich or, you know, the fact that they make less, you know, beneath a certain threshold.
But we really do have a lot of people that they can't read.
You know, we have a lot of people graduating high school with, you know, a fourth or fifth or sixth grade reading level.
We have a lot of stupid people in our country.
We have a lot of stupid people.
Stupid people don't save.
They don't save.
Exactly.
Like part of that, there's a moral impetus here, but there's also an intellectual one.
We were talking about this over lunch today, but the ability to actually, in a tangible way, to conceptualize the future and how you would feel, right?
So, not just how would you feel if you didn't have breakfast, you know, like that requires a certain level of IQ, but to pan out even further and say, How will you eat breakfast 40 years from now with your current behaviors?
And so that's part of the difficulty is, you know, so like I know the biblical principles and I believe the biblical principles, but practically speaking, you do have to recognize, especially with a nation our size and a nation that is not homogenous and a nation that, you know, with a ton of very recent immigrants and many illegal immigrants and all this stuff.
If you were to end Social Security, Just in a moment, instead of kind of weaning off of it, it's kind of like, let's say you have a drug addict, you know, or an alcoholic is a great example.
You have an alcoholic and he needs to stop drinking.
And yes, he's made decisions that aren't just foolish, but they're immoral.
But even hospitals will give him a little bit of alcohol as he's weaning off because it could actually, if it's severe, it could stop his heart.
It could kill him to just go cold turkey, you know, stop alcohol.
All at once.
And civil leaders do have a moral obligation as nursing fathers to care for the citizens that God has appointed them over.
You don't want mass starvation.
You don't want a bunch of elderly people dying alone in their single bedroom apartments without any resources and they can't afford to buy food.
And the reality is that we have a mass sector of our current population that if we didn't do some form of Social Security, They would not save for retirement.
They wouldn't.
They would spend it all and they would not save any.
If the government didn't force them to save, then they wouldn't save.
And it wouldn't just be like, well, you know, well, that's on them.
Crime would go up.
If people are hungry, they steal.
There is anarchy, right?
You know, the old expression, you're always only three meals away from total anarchy and chaos.
And you can just imagine on a scale as large as ours, with 360 million people, with as many differences as we already have.
If all of a sudden people stop getting their social security check.
But the reality is the welfare check.
Yeah, or their welfare check.
But the reality is that stupid is not viable.
Stupid cannot continue.
So even if it's not a calculated decision, if we're going to do this based off of principle, we're going to do it based off of necessity.
It's going to happen eventually.
Eventually, the checks will stop coming because there won't be any money.
And when that happens, we are going to be in a world of hurt.
And even those of us who have tried to be Wise and responsible, you know, like the ant versus the grasshopper.
The ant, you know, works all summer long.
The grasshopper is just playing.
He's not storing up for the winter, but the ant is.
And then, you know, when the winter comes, the grasshopper is going to starve.
And then, you know, in this children's story, you know, the ants invite the grasshopper inside.
And I've read that book to my kids.
And I always tell them, you know, when we get to the end of the story, you know, like, oh, that's nice.
They're sharing with the grasshopper.
And I always tell them, the grasshopper should have been forced to stay outside, starve, and die.
And then the ants could have celebrated and eaten the grasshopper the next spring when the winter's past.
Like, that should be the true moral of the story.
It's actually not virtuous.
It's not moral that the ants take the grasshopper inside when they were working all summer long.
But the point is, this wouldn't just be like thousands of ants and one grasshopper.
This would be thousands, millions of grasshoppers and perhaps fewer ants.
And so if you've been responsible, you're like, well, I would be fine.
Me and my children would be okay because I've been moral, I've been hardworking, I've been wise.
Yeah, but what are you going to do if you still have to live here and now there's millions of people?
You know, running in the streets and, you know, breaking windows of grocery stores and trying to get into, you know, your house and take your supplies.
It could be bad.
Let's go to our last commercial break.
We'll come back and maybe do some predictions and then some alternatives to that.
Talk about Christian retirement too, like how Christians should think about retirement.
Yeah, we'll talk about that as well.
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One thing over the last couple of years that I've realized, and it would have been one of those things where I just didn't put thought into it, but then I started thinking about it and started thinking about it as a Christian, and I said, that doesn't make sense, is in many ways the idea of retirement that I'm going to work for, say, 2022 when I graduate college.
I'm going to work from 22 to 65, and that's that.
And then after that, I'm free to golf, I'm free to go to Florida, I'm free to go on cruises.
This idea of retirement now, there is certainly a way to think of in your final years that you're doing different things that the labor that you did during your main career, especially for men, their skill set, what they're good at, that you transition from that.
But the idea of true retirement that I retire from being productive at the end of my 60s and I don't give back here and I don't throw myself into this here, but I take all my time and all the free time that I have and I go live in Florida.
There's a huge retirement community, it's like 120,000 people there.
It's huge, tons of retired people.
For one, a lot of swingers, but for two, It's golf clubs, it's pickleball, it's tennis, and it's karaoke night and bars and drinking.
That is a wholly unchristian idea.
Nowhere in the Bible are you going to find, hey, at a certain age, if you've worked hard and you paid your dues, you get to check out.
The Christian vision of productivity has no category of retirement.
Now, most certainly, again, if you work a physical job, when you come out of that, you transition to helping around the home, for example, especially you live in a multi generational homestead, for instance, or around your grandkids.
But we need to stop thinking of productivity and making money.
And being productive as something confined to these certain years, and then I get to have fun.
Rather, enjoy those years, but also you should be thinking practically, and this is going to help you have a better quality of life.
It's going to help you live longer.
It's going to maintain better relationships with your family.
And most importantly, be more godly.
My entire life, I am set out to be productive.
From the moment, be it 13, 14, 15, that I can contribute here or I can hold a flashlight for dad as he fixes the car.
From this moment, early on in my life, my goal is to be productive.
I'm going to work towards the kingdom.
I'm going to work towards natural ends.
I'm going to work for my family.
And practically, that doesn't end.
It'll take different forms here, different forms there.
But even in social security, and it's starting at 65, and that being the age that a lot of people retire, already baked in, and it's had an effect on American consciousness.
Hey, that's the point where I check out.
I mean, how many boomers, particularly, maybe they lived in Missouri or they lived in the Northeast and they retired, and it's like, great, you're going to spend more time around your kids, right?
Oh, no, we're going to Florida.
We're going to have a great time down there.
We're going to eat seafood.
We're going to golf a lot.
We're going to go on a cruise.
We're going to go to Europe.
It was funny.
I was watching.
It was Antonio sent me an episode from Sam Hyde, a little bit of profanity in it.
But there's a guy who literally called in and said, My kid is 16 months old, and my grandparents haven't come to see him yet.
That is a very unbiblical idea.
And so, practically speaking, it's not just reject Social Security, but then still at 65, just retire off your own savings.
The whole idea that we have of what we're productive with later on in life needs to be shifted.
Yeah, I agree.
Yeah, there's never a time that we're.
You know, it becomes permissible for us just to check out of productivity.
Obviously, you know, the body begins to break down.
And so, you know, like you can't go work in a coal mine, you know, when you're 85 years old.
But there are ways of still being productive.
And for most of us, depending on your vocation, your later years of life can actually be your most productive years.
That's when you've garnered the most resources, the most wisdom, the most experience.
That's when your young children are out of the home.
Yes, you want to be active with your grandchildren, but still.
You can be a present grandparent with the grandchildren, with your grown children, but that's still less hours in the day than when it's your own children living with you in the home, you know, and you've got five of them, you know, and they're all in the little years.
So you're talking about more time, you're talking about more resources, and you're also talking about more wisdom and experience than ever before in your life, especially from that 65, where, you know, our culture says that's when you retire, but like 65 to 75, that final decade of life.
It has the potential to easily become the most, not just I can still be productive or I can still produce something.
No, it actually has the potential to be the most productive decade of your life.
So instead of working for four decades, 25 to 65, give or take, by squeezing out one more decade of work, still being present with the grandkids, just like even now you want to be present with your children as they're in the home.
But you literally have more time, more resources.
And more wisdom.
And, you know, again, manual labor job is probably off the table, you know, from 65 to 75 years old.
But there are lots of vocations in our current, you know, culture that you would be able to fulfill with more resources, more time, and more experience than you've ever had.
And in talking to some people who are kind of in that last decade of life who are still very active and very productive, most of the guys who I've talked to in that age bracket have said that they've been able to produce more in their last decade, 65 to 75, than in the previous four decades combined.
And when you think about what that does for generational wealth and leaving inheritance, not just to your children, but your children's children, it's like, well, I want to.
I want to spend time with the grandkids.
Okay, spend time with the grandkids, but the grandkids would probably also appreciate a house, you know, if you could buy them a house and still easily spend 20 hours a week with the grandkids.
But go, and that's the thing also, you have more time, but it doesn't take as much time.
Like when you're, you know, 25 to 35 years old, you know, it may take you 60 hours a week to make ends meet.
When you're, you know, 65 to 75 years old and you're the top of your game, top of your field, You can literally be working 15, 20 hours a week and making five times as much as you used to make working 60 hours a week in your first decade of productivity.
So, the 25 to 35 versus the 65 to 75, you could be working a third of the amount or half the amount, but making three, four, five, 10 times as much and be able to save up and give an inheritance to your children, your children's children, even perhaps your great.
Grandchildren, and that's not even to mention beyond just your family, what that does for society.
Obviously, we're not super bullish on our tax dollars and how those end up getting spent by the government, but beyond your family, beyond the state and all of its theft, think of society as at large in terms of the company that you start or the way you already have a company, for instance.
You started a small business and you're going to clock in 10 more years part time, 20 hours a week.
But you have more experience than anybody else there.
You started the company, you know how it runs better than anybody else, and you're able with 20 hours a week to double or triple over the course of that final decade in 10 years, double or triple the size of that company.
So it's not just that you make more money for your family and your children's children, but you also created, hypothetically, 10 more job opportunities in society at large.
Your town now has 10 other families that are employed because of your labor and your work.
If you're a Christian man, And we pray that you are, then first pick for those jobs looking at Christian men, younger Christian men who are capable and hardworking in your local church.
We have guys in our church who employ other members of our church.
And so to just check out and say, well, now it's time to collect seashells at the beach every single day of the week is not a biblical concept.
Yeah.
I also like the concept of thinking about intergenerational households as like a flywheel or a positive feedback loop in the sense that imagine you're a man.
Let's say you're a manual, you work sort of manual labor, you're a man of ordinary abilities.
As you age, let's say 50, 55, 60, the means of your productivity do diminish.
And not for Altman is there an opportunity to really start businesses.
I mean, based on your abilities.
But you can think about the intergenerational household like this.
Even that man, I think productivity peaks in terms of total output, wages, hours worked around the mid 30s.
So, you can imagine a man with young children being prudent, being wise, and starting to carve out some of his high productivity earnings for his children.
When his children come of age, his sons are 20, 22, they actually are left with something going into adulthood and into productivity, which actually allows them to not always be scraping, right?
It gives them a leg up, so to speak.
And so they actually tend to do better, left something going into adulthood.
As their parents age, they are in a better position to actually support financially, even their aging parents.
So the aging parents sort of support more with the children and in the home.
And the children are able to support them financially to do that.
That's an incredibly important point.
My wife and I, Megan, we've talked about this.
This July 31st will be our 10th year anniversary.
And from the day that we were married, I remember even on the honeymoon discussing this, but it's been our 10 year plan.
And we've been actively working towards this.
What we realized is just the way that money works, time is a massive factor.
If you can get $500,000 today, And there's wisdom applied and how to invest it and how to use it and these kinds of things.
$500,000 today is worth far more than $2 million 30 years from now.
And so time is such a big factor.
So I'm glad that you brought that up, Antonio.
But we kind of resolved one of our resolutions in our marriage as it pertains to our children, of which we currently have six, one in glory, and five with us here.
But our goal is that we, and here's the problem it's just like kind of similar to.
Social Security.
It's like you got a bad system, and to write the ship, it gets worse initially before it gets better.
There's a steep learning curve.
It's painful because repentance is always painful, right?
That's why people don't want to repent because initially it involves confession and probably some shame and a change in habits and lifestyle and behavior and all these kinds of things.
So, any kind of initial change to change a system or to change your own habits and behavior, the initial change is always costly.
But the reason you do it is because in the long run, it pays dividends.
And so, one of the things that we've thought is the way that inheritances typically work.
Now, granted, you know, in this current generation, a lot of boomers literally, you know, have bumper stickers on the back of their car that say, I'm spending my children's inheritance.
So, the boomers are arguably the most wicked generation that has ever been born of women, at least in American history for the past 400 years.
And I know, but there's a caveat here.
Nope.
That's the statement.
It doesn't need to be caveated.
It is actually objectively true.
The boomers are quite easily, arguably, the most wicked generation in American history over the past 400 years.
And one, just one tenet of their wickedness is that they brag about not leaving inheritance to their children.
But, so let's think of other generations.
If we're not thinking about the boomers, at least the past three generations, four generations, That did leave inheritances that weren't as wicked as boomers.
One of the things that they would do is you leave an inheritance once you're dead and it goes to the children.
And sometimes the grandchildren, there might be something for them, but a lot of times it's just kind of everything that's left at that moment when the elderly couple passes away is left to their children.
But it happens when they die.
And usually the way that the math tends to work out is by the time your parents die, you're usually in your 40s.
Or even 50s.
And praise God for that.
I want my parents and my wife's parents, because we love them both.
We moved here to this location in Texas to be with them.
They're close by, we see them on a regular basis.
It's an incredible blessing.
And so we are not eager for our parents to die.
We wish them a long, healthy, happy life as long as possible.
We'd rather have them than their stuff.
I want to make that clear.
That said, eventually they will die.
And when they die, just practically speaking, Megan and I will probably be in our 40s or 50s.
Well, in our 40s or 50s, if we get whatever it is, if we get 100 grand or 500 grand, I don't know.
I'm not asking them about those things as their prerogative if they wanted to share.
But if it's a few hundred grand, a few hundred grand when I'm six years older than my wife, let's say I'm 50 and my wife is, I'm 51 and my wife's 45.
A few hundred grand, praise God, we'll be exceedingly grateful.
But a few hundred grand at that stage of life for us is not even comparable to the same amount of money if we got that when we were both in our early 30s.
You know what I mean?
When we're looking at.
Buying our first home, you know, or trying to start my first business, you know, or, you know, those kinds of things.
So, but the problem is it becomes a cycle, just like Social Security, the system.
And so, Megan and I are thinking already, we're thinking, okay, well, by the time we die, it'll be the same thing.
Our children will likely be in their 40s or 50s.
Sacrificing Inheritance for Kids00:04:34
So, we're trying to basically get in a position financially, and God has been gracious, and I think we can do it to where as soon as we get an inheritance, we're going to forego it and we're going to give it to our kids.
Because we'll be in our 40s or 50s, but our kids will be in their 20s and 30s and need it.
It's like right now, mom, dad, I just got married.
We're a year into marriage.
I'm pregnant, thinking of my daughters.
We're expecting our first child.
And man, we're looking at home prices and we're so discouraged.
And it's like, sweetheart, I've got good news for you.
Daddy's got you.
And like that, can you imagine how, as a father, how good and right and pleasing to the Lord and pleasing to my baby girl, even if she's 22 years old, she's always going to be my baby girl.
Like to be able to say that.
And what it requires, just in brass tacks, is my wife and I, all it requires is that our parents leave us an inheritance and that we work hard to be in a financial position to where we're able to forego it, to where we don't need it.
So then our parents, so we're the one generation that breaks the system.
And it requires some selflessness, a little bit of sacrifice, and saying, we, our generation, will be the generation that doesn't get an inheritance.
And so our kids will get ours, so that then ours will be the grandkids' inheritance.
You know, because by the time we die, our kids will be in their 40s or 50s, but the grandkids will be in their 20s, 30s, and it'll be the perfect time for them.
And so that's, we've, you know, we've thought about it and talked about it and planned, you know, and scraped, you know, and budgeted and thought, but that's been our plan for 10 years.
It's just something that I, and I really feel like it was the Lord just kind of giving me some wisdom.
And my wife immediately was like, yes, that just, that seems right and it seems good.
But that's really, I say it that way because it's a little daunting, but.
But I do think it's freeing because it is doable.
Because all it really requires, if you're like, man, I don't know if I can save up 500 grand, right?
Like, my oldest child is 12, and I don't know if in six to eight years I'm going to have half a million dollars to be able to buy them a home.
And I'm like, dude, I get it.
That's, yeah, that's a bit intimidating for sure.
And you probably won't, you know, work for it.
I'm working for it.
Let's see what God might do.
But, you know, I'll, you know, hate to be the bearer of bad news, but yeah, that goal probably will not be met.
However, you may not be able to save up half a million dollars, you know, or a quarter million dollars or whatever, or $100,000 for each of your children, especially if you have several, which is a wonderful thing four, five, six, seven, eight children.
But what you maybe can do is you can very respectfully, you want to honor father and mother, but respectfully and humbly talk to your parents about encouraging them to leave an inheritance and even letting them know that your plan is to be financially fit to where you can forego that inheritance.
So, that what they're leaving for you will actually go to the grandkids and little inside baseball.
You tell your parents it'll go to the grandkids.
Your parents probably like the grandkids more than you.
And so, it actually works as a little financial incentive for them to leave an inheritance.
And that's really all it takes at the end of the day is for one generation to say, The buck stops with me.
Quite literally, I won't get the bucks.
The bucks stop with me and my generation.
We're going to skip our inheritance so that the inheritance can pick back up with every generation after us, but they get it at the time of life when they need it.
Instead of 20, 30 years too late.
And the two things that you get from that, it's easy if you had a $250,000 check coming to very quickly begin to think of the country club membership, the cruises.
But practically speaking, you buy a home and we're trying to do the same thing.
We own multiple homes.
My goal is to give them to our children.
Well, you get your kids living close to you.
There's some really cool research coming out of Harvard.
Grandparents live around grandkids, they retire from injury better, they're more active, they live longer.
So you get the benefits of your children staying near you.
And then the benefits that come with living in that godly way.
So it's all right, I'm foregoing the country club membership.
I'm foregoing a little bit of the travel and a little bit of a nicer home.
And what I'm getting is an extra 10 years of life.
What I'm getting is an extra quality of life.
That's what the Bible is saying.
The righteous man leaves an inheritance to his children's children.
And then those children stay around and they have a beautiful intergenerational, be it a homestead, be it they live down the street, something that makes everybody's lives better.
I mean, how many stressed out moms, one of the reasons they're stressed out, They don't have any family in the area to help them.
She needs a doctor's appointment.
I've got to arrange a babysitter.
My husband has to take off work.
So the younger ones are helped, the older ones are helped.
Protestant Religion in 177600:15:21
It's how God designed it.
Yeah, I hear stories all the time of millennials who live within like a stone's throw, right?
So it's not like they're asking their parents to fly across the country, but they live in the same town, down the street, adjacent neighborhoods, and cannot get the grandparents who are retired and have no obligations to come over for two hours just so that mom can go to a dentist appointment.
Instead, dad has to take off work.
They have to tighten the budget a little bit more because he lost some hours and lost some pay so that he can stay home with the kids so that mom can go to the dentist office.
Meanwhile, parents are literally right down the street in some cases and will not do it.
I mean, just playing golf.
Literally.
Yeah, they're playing.
What are you doing?
They can't miss tea time.
They're fourth tea time this week.
And yeah.
Yeah, it's really wicked.
Really, really wicked.
All right, let's do this.
Let's go ahead and go to the super chats.
We'll start with those first.
We've got one.
From John Baptist 702.
Antonio, will you read this one?
Yeah.
So the super chat says Off topic, Good Fight Ministries has been saying that post-mo Christians are misleading the church about the Antichrist, race relations in Israel.
Will you make a response video?
God bless.
I'll let you answer.
Those are those guys, Eric Kahn, that they came after you and Eric Kahn with the Aristotle quote, and we responded to them.
Oh, okay.
Big fans of our response.
I don't, I guess my response would be the meme.
I don't think about you at all.
Yeah.
So, yeah, no, I think we address those things all the time.
Everybody knows where I stand with eschatology, and I've given my defenses and the reasons for that.
In terms of the Antichrist, I don't believe in a singular Antichrist.
I believe that many Antichrists have gone out into the world.
1 John talks about that.
And I believe that we have much of that throughout the church age, including today.
But in terms of a singular figure, I think that if there was an Antichrist, I think there was a beast.
I think Nero was the beast, but I think a lot of those things are already fulfilled in our time in history.
So I have a partial, you know, preterist hermeneutic that I apply to the scripture, preterist just meaning fulfilled or past.
So I think that those things are done.
But if we want to talk about the Antichrist, I don't prescribe to a future Antichrist, you know, future from the year of our Lord 2025 and a singular figure.
But if we want to talk about, you know, the spirit of the Antichrist or some kind of, you know, some kind of entity or group or whatever that's going to wreak havoc, You know, even though I am post millennial and I am ultimately optimistic, but that would cause kind of a dip along this trajectory up, a significant dip.
I feel like that's something we talk about too.
And I think that there are a lot of potential suitors for that role.
I think of the tech lords and Peter Thiel and the PayPal mafia and AI and its capabilities.
I think of the nation state of Israel and Netanyahu and.
Constantly trying to start wars in the Middle East and have, in many ways, a stranglehold politically over our nation.
So, if we want to talk about, you know, in a metaphorical, kind of more general sense, spirit of an antichrist, I think that Judaism and Israel is ripe for the picking.
I think Peter Thiel and the PayPal mafia is ripe for the picking.
Transhumanism, Elon Musk, transhumanism.
Transhumanism.
Surpass and elevate ourselves above.
Being carbon based life forms.
Right.
So, I guess what I would say, long story short, what I would say is on that piece, you know, post millennialism, eschatology, and how it plays into the Antichrist, no, we're not dispensational, praise God.
We're not premillennial.
However, that does not mean, and this is where we probably would have some healthy pushback for a lot of our post millennial friends, is that yes, I am post millennial, but I believe that there are dips and spikes, not just a clear, you know, perfect staircase, you know, all the way up to glory.
But dips and spikes along the way.
And I believe that some of those dips can be absolutely significant and that they can be caused by individuals or groups of individuals, certain ideologies.
I think of Marxism, I think of Judaism, I think of Zionism, I think of transhumanism.
I think there are lots of different technological innovations.
It could be innovations, inventions, peoples, groups, ideologies, religions.
That can all in various times, they all have the potential within the providence of God, within his sovereign plan, to not be the singular antichrist, but to pose an immense threat to the church that sets back Christendom, in some cases, centuries.
And I think we're in one of those moments.
And so I don't have the exact same language, but my point is I'm not so optimistic that I'm naive.
I'm not one of the post millennials that kind of just thinks, you know, I can just sit back, you know, and.
And you know, we're uh, that post mill, you know, and no, uh, we're getting our butts kicked.
That's that's where we currently are.
Age is just around the corner.
No, just a couple more years.
We fight on, we pray on, we're gaining ground.
Well, and yes, fight on, pray on in the big space.
And we are at the bottom of the hill.
We are gaining ground.
Honestly, this is what I can say with a clear conscience fight on, pray on, we will gain ground.
And we have gained ground.
Currently, I don't think we're gaining ground.
We're gaining ground downhill.
We have gained ground, and I believe there's a promise we will gain ground.
Currently, we're getting our butts kicked.
And for me, that just motivates me to stay in the fight and not to retreat.
So the spirit of the Antichrist kind of thing, yes, I think that's always looming, and Christians should be aware.
But a literal Antichrist, and it's Trump, you know, or it's Elon, or, you know, or I think that's stupid.
And I think Christians have been mocked enough for being stupid.
And I'd like to see my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, who I truly believe are regenerate, who I love and I care for, I'd like to see them not be so embarrassing.
Do you guys have anything to add on that?
People got to remember Antichrist doesn't appear in the book of Revelation.
You have the beast, you have Satan, the devil, obviously.
Right.
Antichrist, it's 1 John.
And 1 John is referencing something different than Revelation there.
Exactly.
Many antichrist, plural, have gone out into the world.
Anyone who denies that Jesus has come in the flesh is an antichrist, not the, but an antichrist.
And there are many.
And you can do that as a secular humanist.
You can do that.
I mean, and I think a lot of what 1 John does have in mind is any non Christian denying that Christ has come in the flesh, but particularly Jews, because that was the crux of their specific denial was that no, Christ, Jesus was not the Christ.
He was not.
The Messiah.
And so I do think that it is fair to say that Israel does not have a monopoly on Antichrist, but is a major shareholder.
So, yeah.
Okay.
So let's see.
Are there any other questions?
That was the only super chat for today.
Wes, you want to read some of the questions?
Let's say this is relevant to the topic.
And then PA Hunter had a couple questions.
But Charity Williamson asked this How often should Christians give money to their family in need?
What about when those family members?
Consistently make unwise choices?
No, that's a great question.
When helping hurts.
Yeah, when helping hurts and when people abuse your kindness, like you're kind to them and it's like you abuse this.
There is no for sure answer three times.
And if they misuse the money three times or five times or 10 times, I think the best barometer would be in my giving, am I actually doing damage?
Am I actually enabling?
So this person is an alcoholic.
I've given money to them a couple of times.
First one went to rent, second one went to a 24 pack.
I'm actually giving to the point I'm enabling an addiction, I'm enabling indulgence, I'm enabling sin.
I don't think in good conscience a Christian can give when they can reasonably expect, yeah, they're going to use this for drugs, they're going to use this for alcohol, they're going to use this to do something sinful.
Now, at the same time, I've given, they've needed help a couple of times.
They did pay their rent off with it.
I can suspect or I guess maybe they, you know, went out to Red Lops or whatever it is.
I think then you're looking at something different.
I don't know for sure.
They have generally used it for what I've said.
I think there's a little bit more duty to charity, but for sure, if you're like, this person abused it, I gave them money to fix their car and they didn't do it.
I gave them money for rent, they didn't use it for that.
I gave them money for this, they used it for alcohol, then we have no duty because what we'd actually be doing is enabling sin.
Yeah.
And I mean, it should go without saying, but unfortunately it doesn't.
And I know from firsthand experience, but as a matter of prudence, what's helpful when you help family is to have the uncomfortable conversation about the contingencies attached to the support.
And saying, hey, I need you to use this money in this particular way.
This is what you're telling me you're going to use it for.
If you violate that, you can't expect more support from me, frankly.
Yep.
There's criteria.
And that's perfectly within your rights to give.
Not only is it permissible, but it actually, you might actually, there might be even a moral obligation to do that, not just to protect yourself and your loved ones, your children, your wife, but also as a protection for the individual that you're being charitable towards, because they actually would only bring about more harm to themselves.
Okay, here's some comments, Antonio.
You want to read P.A. Hunter?
Yeah, let's start from the top.
A couple here from P.A. Hunter.
First one at the top says Do you all believe that America is supposed to be Christian?
I never saw the founding fathers mention Jesus or anything.
I will say one of the shortcomings of specifically the Constitution and Declaration of Independence is what I'm thinking of, but even a lot in our American consciousness is being very okay with the idea of God, but often stopping short of naming Christ in God we trust, right?
One nation under God.
America, for sure, has been very deistic in everything that it says, from endowed by their creator in the Declaration, in the year of our Lord, in the Constitution.
But we have most certainly lacked some of that explicit naming of Jesus Christ.
However, as far as, and I think you're pulling it up even now, Joel, as far as were the states, were the governors, were the founders themselves personally, were they suffused with the Christian Protestant religion?
Absolutely.
And they, of course, intended in this founding, It was not the idea.
Some of the fringe ones, like Jefferson, yeah, they had a little bit of it in their mind, but it was for sure not in their mind that we're so excited to create the first ever pluralistically religious state.
They started sessions with prayers.
Many of the states themselves had state churches.
So Maryland had a state church, Georgia had a state church.
There were requirements in those states for people holding public office.
You must profess the triune God.
You cannot be an atheist.
And as a point of history, it's important to note what the Constitution was.
Because that's what's most relevant here.
The Constitution incorporated a concept of federalism.
It wasn't a federation, it was a strong centralized central government, but it was federalistic in the sense that whatever the Constitution didn't delegate was resolved to the states.
You had at that time in the 13 colonies various denominations, you know, and one state in Maryland, every single one of them had a state church except Maryland had a Catholic church.
But all the rest were Protestants.
What you actually see in the Constitution, the lack of that specific naming of any particular denomination, isn't saying.
America is not Christian.
That's right.
It's a respect of the federalistic practice of states being able to determine what that religion was, what that specific Trinitarian Christian faith practice was.
For the sake of having a pan Protestant nation that didn't go to civil war, right?
Like if you, if, you know, like if, if the, at the national level, if the national church was Episcopalian and then, you know, Texas is a Baptist church and Oklahoma is a Presbyterian church, like then, um, And then there's going to be some major conflict, right?
If you have this is the national church, this is the state church.
Whereas, you know, like for there to be, you know, the national bird, the bald eagle, you know, and for in our case, you know, Texas, the mockingbird, nobody's going to war over eagles versus, you know, mockingbirds.
But people would go to war over religion.
So again, you're right, Antonio, at the national level, to not declare a national church was not to say that we want church to stay out of our nation.
No, It was.
We don't want to be overbearing on this matter.
We're assuming Christianity.
We're assuming, furthermore, in America's conception, not just Christianity, but Protestant Christianity, and all the states, or at least many of them, already have churches.
Here's a couple citations.
I texted this to the U.S.
I don't know if it's something that you're able to put on the screen.
If you can, it'd be great for those who are watching to be able to have a visual copy.
But if not, it's okay.
I'm going to read it for both those watching and the listener.
Delaware, 1776.
This is a citation from Article 22.
The text says this is text Roman numeral 1, A and B.
I do profess faith in God the Father.
And in Jesus Christ, his only Son, and in the Holy Ghost, one God, blessed forevermore.
And I do acknowledge the holy scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by divine inspiration.
That's Delaware in 1776.
Maryland in 1776.
Citation Declaration of Rights, Article 35.
The text says, A Declaration of Belief in the Christian Religion.
North Carolina, 1776.
Citation from Article 32.
The text says, No person who shall deny the being of God or the truth of the Protestant religion, not just Christian, but Protestant religion, or the divine authority of either of the Old or New Testaments, right?
The divine authority of the Bible, shall be capable of holding any office.
That's in North Carolina, 1776.
Georgia, in 1777.
Citation, Article 6.
The text says the representatives shall be of the Protestant religion.
That's Georgia, 1777.
South Carolina, 1778.
Now, citation, Article 3 says this The representatives shall be of the Protestant religion.
The representatives shall be of the Protestant religion.
That's Protestant Christian religion.
That was South Carolina, 1778.
And lastly, New Jersey.
Enforcing First Amendment Laws00:10:18
And this is just some citations.
New Jersey, 1776.
Citation, Article 14.
Text says this.
No person shall be eligible to sit in the legislator unless he is a member of the Protestant religion.
Okay, so anybody who says that America wasn't Christian is either lying or stupid.
America, absolutely, in its founding, was Christian, and more than that, it was also Protestant.
And I am grateful for Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, but I would say both.
By theological conviction for myself personally, but then also beyond just my theological convictions, but speaking of America's heritage and history and what is truly American, because I actually like America.
I want things that are American.
America is Protestant and certainly was Protestant in its conception and its founding.
And the reason why I highlighted these citations is because they're more recent.
If you go back 100 years prior and you're looking at the 13 colonies and you're looking at the 1600s, then it's just like, it's not even.
Negotiable.
Like if somebody said, Hey, you know, you guys are building to start a country where, you know, Muslims can be here and set up, you know, they can set up mosques, you know, and they can have, you know, statues and prayer sirens, you know, citywide prayer sirens, you know, calls to prayer five times a day.
That's what you're doing, right?
They would have said, Hang him.
Somebody get a rope, you know, short rope, tall tree, and let's take care of business.
That you just don't know American history.
And for those who would say, Well, okay, that's fine, but, you know, the Constitution, they took it out.
No, they didn't.
I wish, like Wes said, I do wish that they had been more explicit.
But to say that they took it out is not true.
The First Amendment, right?
Freedom of religion and freedom of speech.
The first word of the First Amendment is Congress.
What they were saying is that, again, like what we've already established, at a national level, there will not be a national church.
Remember what they're fleeing from.
They're not fleeing from Christianity, they're fleeing from a national church of England that was abusive in its meticulous, tedious practices and imposing them upon the church with penalty of the law.
Like, for instance, they were making You know, Puritan pastors in England read, you know, the game stats from the sports almanac on the Lord's Day from the pulpit in the middle of church.
And they were doing that.
The king, you know, was doing that to these Protestant Puritan pastors in England just to tick them off, because he knew that it violated their conscience and he was just being a jerk and bullying them.
And so what they're escaping is not Christianity.
What they're escaping is some of the meticulous, abusive.
Forms of Christian tyranny from a national church where the king was able to control the practices of ministers.
That's what they're escaping.
So even in the First Amendment, that's what they're hedging against.
They're not trying to hedge against Christianity wholesale.
And they're certainly not trying to carve out provisions for a bunch of Hindus and Muslims and, you know, sand demons and, you know, Jews.
That's not what they're doing.
What they're trying to do is they're trying to say at the national level, Congress cannot establish.
A national church, a national religion.
Notice that they don't say that states or representatives or senators cannot establish this at a state level.
And what they're definitely not doing is saying anybody can be whatever religion they want.
That's not reading the Constitution.
That is just isogeating, reading into the Constitution what is not there according to your own secular humanistic biases.
And just real quick to make it abundantly clear.
Sort of a polemical case in point, you see what's listed here.
These laws in the state constitutions are obviously before the Constitution was created in 1789.
Around the same time.
Right.
But the important point is that many of these state constitutional articles persisted after the Constitution was ratified.
And so, what that means is, as we talk about the founders and all of the men at the Constitutional Convention, they knew these laws were on the book.
Yes.
They still created the First Amendment.
And didn't deem those laws unconstitutional.
Exactly.
So they created the Constitution at the national level, knew these laws on the books at the state level, and saw zero contradiction.
Correct.
We still have blasphemy laws like on the books in Missouri.
Any blasphemy of the triune God within five days of occurrence actually merits legal penalties.
Then you have to have will to enforce.
And there are states where abortion is still legal, illegal.
We just don't have the will to enforce it.
That's right.
But literally today, on the books, you could go to Missouri, hey, criminal penal code, you blaspheme the triune God, so not just God in a deistic sense.
That's straight to jail.
Straight to jail.
You could.
Right.
Yeah.
So these are laws that were on the books.
In some cases, laws that are still on the books.
We just don't currently have the populace that loves God to therefore have the political will to carry it out.
There's still sodomy laws on the books in Texas.
They're just not enforced.
Yet.
Yet.
But they can be.
P.A. Hunter asked also Do y'all think Christianity permits usury?
We did an episode on usury, just shirts, right response ministries, usury.
Full hour and 20 minutes.
I think it would definitely answer your question a little bit better than we could do right now.
And then one more question is it inheritance is set in Christian law, X percentage to specific family members?
And the answer would just be no.
I would say that the firstborn, especially if they're a son, they should take preeminence.
The firstborn son, ultimately, he has to chart his own way.
Other siblings could come and work for him.
They could observe what he did.
I joined the military, and it's funny, my two younger siblings, a sister and a brother, they both did too because they saw that it worked out really well.
But I didn't have the advantage of following.
I'm the oldest.
I didn't have the advantage of following an older sibling.
So I will.
I have an oldest son.
He'll probably get a bigger inheritance than the other children, not because he's worth more or I love him more, but practically, he's going to have to chart his way.
It's going to be earlier.
The ability I'm able to help him is going to be less.
He's not going to have siblings to look up to, to be employed by, to model after.
And so he'll get some more, but all of them will get something.
And also, Rush Jr. talks about this and it's really helpful.
And he gives a lot of the biblical citations, but there is also biblical precedence for disinheriting a wayward child.
So a child that refuses to repent, a child that has gone apostate and denied the Lord Jesus, that is absolutely within the parents' prerogative to.
Actually, I think it's more than just prerogative.
I think it's actually an obligation to cut that wayward apostate child out of the will.
And the whole purpose, you know, Rush Dooney, you know, expounding on that, he talks about the whole purpose is, again, it's building godly society and building godly wealth.
So, what you're doing is like, you know, if you had a godly society, you'd have godly laws.
And if you actually have the political will to enforce them, then one of the things that you're seeing, Is that the unruly, that the wicked, that the wayward are being punished and therefore they're course correcting, or in those cases of capital crimes, they're receiving capital punishment.
So they're being culled from society.
And then, likely, if they're younger, then they don't have posterity.
And so you're kind of weeding them out of the populace.
And then, likewise, you're doing that also economically in terms of the transfer of wealth.
Who gets the wealth?
The righteous children get the wealth.
The wicked children are removed from the will.
If they apostatize, they deny the Lord Jesus Christ.
And so, what you're doing generation by generation by generation, both through legislation and law keeping and enforcement and through the family, the household, and passing down generational wealth, is you're actually building a society that generation by generation is more prosperous, more righteous.
And the opposite effect can easily happen.
That's where we find ourselves today, where you're actually incentivizing and rewarding the wicked and penalizing the righteous.
You want to work really hard?
Okay, we'll take more, not just more money, but a higher percentage.
Like right now, you have the choice with your business.
You could employ 15 more people and be a blessing to the community and leave more of an inheritance to your children.
But if you take this next step, it puts you over this tax bracket.
And all of a sudden, you're now going to be, instead of taxed 30%, you're going to be taxed 50%.
And there's also going to be this estate tax, a death tax that kicks in.
So you can't even work.
The inheritance that you're going to leave to your children and your children's children upon death is as much as it's ever going to be because anything you do to grow your wealth now, that'll just go to the state when you die.
So a lot of people reach this point, especially European countries.
Some of the tax laws are absolutely atrocious, but they reach a point where fiscally it actually makes zero sense.
To produce anything more.
Because not only will you not get more, your children won't get more.
You can't give more of an inheritance.
Literally, all it will do is just further fill the coffers of the state.
So, if you incentivize laziness, if you incentivize a lack of productivity, if you incentivize wickedness and these kinds of things, then you get more and more wicked generations.
But on the flip side, if you incentivize righteousness and if you penalize debauchery and wickedness, then you get more and more righteous generations.
Abolition of Reality Discussion00:01:04
And so it's.
It's hard, but it's not complicated.
It is hard, but it's simple.
You just have to have the will, the will to do it.
Okay, I think that's it for today.
We're at 4 45 right now, so we've gone an hour and 45 minutes.
I feel like that's sufficient.
We will see you guys on Wednesday.
It'll be Wes and I, we're going to be piping in someone from Western Front Books, one of their authors from a new book that they just recently published.
And so I'm excited about that.
The topic is going to be the abolition of reality.
John Waters is the author of this book, The Abolition of Reality.
So, we're going to be talking to him about that fascinating topic.
And then we're going to take off Friday for the 4th of July.
We all have plans with family and friends.
Our church is getting together.
So, we'll miss out on Friday.
So, we'll see you on Wednesday for Western Front Books.
John Waters joining the show, Wes and I.
And then we'll take off Friday.
And then we'll see you again next week with the three of us, myself, Antonio, and Wes.