Point of View April 15, 2025 – Hour 2 : Tuesday’s Top Topics

[00:00:04] Across America, Live, this is Point of View, Kirby Anderson. Second hour today, it is Tax Day. I thought we'd spend a little bit of time talking about that because, first of all, you have to file your taxes. As I've pointed out before, a lot of times people say, it's when I pay their taxes.

[00:00:31] No, we probably already paid them because those were withdrawn from your paycheck. But now you can file your taxes and determine whether you owe or they owe you. And so we'll get into that in just a minute. It also relates to something we will cover by the end of the program on what about all of these anti-Doge protesters? What do they really want? And aren't they at least a little bit concerned about the size and scope of government?

[00:00:58] And even the article that I have there by Don Federer, who's been on the program with us before, has a couple of things that he says. And I thought, has he been not looking at the right numbers that we've been looking at, too? So that is a case. We will spend a fair amount of time talking about China because once we get into this issue of tariffs, China is front and center. And that is another issue that we'll be talking about as well.

[00:01:22] Let me open up the phones, though, because one of the things I would love to do is hear from you since you are paying your taxes. You might have heard me say even yesterday that, of course, when you talk about tax compliance, and that's why I did that on Monday, some of you might have waited until April 14th to file your taxes. And as a result, realize that this is a little more complex than you might have expected,

[00:01:47] because, after all, we have 6,800 pages in the tax code. In just a minute, I'm going to quote from a Cal Thomas column that came out today that actually makes those pages even small by comparison when you add in the regulations. But the estimates were that we will spend about collectively 8 billion hours trying to comply with a tax code.

[00:02:14] Now, for some of you that maybe have a 1040EZ, well, that wasn't very difficult. But for others who are professionals dealing with huge corporations, S corporations and multinational corporations, or even if you've just decided that because we are losing value in our dollars,

[00:02:35] maybe what I need to do is find a way to hire a financial planner to put that money away in something a little more complex. But even an IRA or a 401K can get pretty complex pretty quickly. And so soon you're not only hiring a financial planner, you're also hiring a bookkeeper or an accountant. And that is, of course, where we find ourselves today.

[00:03:00] But if you have read my commentary today, which is on the website, pointofview.net, or maybe you've heard it if you've been listening on various radio programs, I point out that Tax Freedom Day was Saturday, April 12th. Now, Tax Freedom Day is calculated by basically taking all the income earned in a year divided into the number of individuals.

[00:03:24] And so we sort of get the assessment that the average date is April 12th this year. As I've pointed out before, Tax Freedom Day happened a long time ago for some people in low-tax areas. And it is still coming as late as middle of May for some in the blue states with state income taxes and the rest.

[00:03:48] Cost of Government Day is in July, which again just illustrates how much time we spend working for the government. Cal Thomas put it this way, it's time again to feed the insatiable beast. He says we have some rituals, the 4th of July, Memorial Day, Veterans Day. Of course, we have Passover, we have Easter, we have Christmas. But he says one annual ritual that can safely be said most Americans despise is April 15th.

[00:04:17] When half of us who pay federal income taxes must render under Caesar portions of our hard-earned money to a government that wastes much of it and dislikes exposure and accountability. Which he says is one of the reasons why Elon Musk and his band of Doge warriors are despised. He says two constitutional amendments have been especially hated by the public. One was the 16th Amendment, which was ratified on February 3rd, 1913.

[00:04:43] It granted Congress the authority to impose and collect taxes on income before the government raised money through tariffs. He says, sound familiar? And excise taxes. The other amendment is the 18th Amendment, which prohibited the manufacturing, sale, and transportation of intoxicating liquors. That amendment was repealed in 1933. The 16th Amendment remains allowing Congress, he's got to turn a phrase here,

[00:05:06] to continue its intoxication with our money, bilking those billionaires and millionaires Democrats love to attack, although some of them are wealthy. How did some become millionaires on low six-figure salaries? Of course, that's a good question that we can always ask, especially if some members of Congress will leave it at that. He points out that, again, the tax code has 6,871 pages, but if you look at the tax regulations,

[00:05:35] I should have put that in my commentary, that number is 75,000 pages. And I do have a brother. He was the smart one in the family, by the way, Mensa and all of that. He is a tax accountant, and he has the patience, which I do not have, to actually look through those tax codes in that regard. And, of course, then you also have this problem because the IRS has all these rules and regulations,

[00:06:04] but he says bureaucratic regulators who add to the laws passed by Congress are one of the problem, but the other is Congress itself, which grants deductions to some but not to others, and those are the real culprits. And I have done commentaries on the past where I've read from some of the tax code, which is so blatantly obvious to actually provide one particular company a benefit

[00:06:32] and exclude all the others. So a lot of those tax regulations are unfair at their face, and I don't know why we haven't had people sue that under, if nothing else, equal protection in the 14th Amendment. But, again, I digress. Cal Thomas ends by saying this. It's time to feed the insatiable beast, so what can we do? He says, first, Americans must rely less on government and more on themselves.

[00:07:01] Reasonable decisions in one's personal and financial life mostly guarantees that government will be less likely a first resource and more likely a last resource or last resort. And that's the point. I mean, I think everybody is willing to give a hand up, but to give a perpetual hand out I think goes against the grain of the American entrepreneurial spirit. Second, he goes on to say people who have tortured us must be shamed.

[00:07:31] And he said in Puritan society, shaming or public humiliation was a common practice. Today nothing is shameful because the standards have been discarded. And he points out, again, that you have Congress including earmarks for favored projects, things that never went through the budgetary process. He doesn't mention it here, but let me mention the fact that you have these continuing resolutions which never went through a budget process.

[00:07:59] And so, again, he argues that every government agency, every cabinet agency, every government program should be able to justify its existence. And, of course, that will bring us full circle to our last commentary, which I'll end today with a piece by Don Federer about why are the anti-Doge protesters so upset and what is causing them to be upset. I think you'll find that out in just a minute.

[00:08:28] We come back, though. A couple of good pieces by our good friend Colonel Alan West, also one by Elaine Dezaniski, about China because China has been kind of in the crosshairs of tariffs. And I think we're learning a lot more about some of the cheating of China. And we'll talk about that right after this.

[00:08:58] This is Viewpoints with Kirby Anderson. Today is tax day, but I would suggest that a more important date is Tax Freedom Day. That is the date when your tax burden is lifted. It is calculated by dividing the official government tally of all taxes collected in each year by the amount of all income earned in each year. Put another way, it's when you are no longer working for the government, but are now working for yourself and your family. This year, Tax Freedom Day occurs on April 12th. And remember, this is an average.

[00:09:27] Citizens in states like Louisiana already have had their Tax Freedom Day. Citizens in New York must wait until the middle of May for their Tax Freedom Day. Some estimate that Americans will pay more in taxes than they will spend on food, clothing, and housing combined. Another estimates we pay more in taxes than we spend on food, education, and health care combined. There is one more date worth mentioning. It's called the Cost of Government Day. This is the date in which the average American has paid his share of the financial burden

[00:09:56] imposed by the spending and regulation that occurs on the federal, state, and local levels. This date occurs sometime in July. This date is a little less precise since it is difficult to calculate all the cost of government regulations. Even so, the Cost of Government Day really puts things in perspective. It takes a little more than half of the year to finally get government off your back so that you can begin to earn a living for you and your family. Both dates help us realize what is happening around us. There is a cost, but often we don't see it.

[00:10:25] Our taxes are withheld from each paycheck, so we often don't think about what we're paying. And since the cost of most regulations is hidden, we don't see those costs either. Imagine if we had to pay all our taxes in one lump sum. You can bet there would be an outcry from taxpayers that year. I'm Kirby Anderson, and that's my point of view. For a free booklet on biblical reliability, go to viewpoints.info slash biblical reliability.

[00:10:53] Viewpoints.info slash biblical reliability. You're listening to Point of View, your listener-supported source for truth. Back once again, if you'd like to join the conversation, 1-800-351-1212. Are you excited about paying your taxes? Do you think you're paying too much in your taxes? What about this idea of tariffs?

[00:11:15] I think it is certainly unlikely that we will be able to go back to actually not paying taxes and having all of the federal government funded by tariffs. But that was the way in which the government was funded for a long period of time. There was an attempt to try to implement an income tax during the 19th century.

[00:11:39] The Supreme Court struck it down, and so that's why eventually you had the 16th Amendment, which came in 1913. At the time, we were told, and I even have somewhere in my files, the original tax form that you filled out, and you had to be fairly wealthy to even have paid income tax. And we were assured it was only going to be a tax on the wealthy, the kind of thing that Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would have endorsed.

[00:12:08] But it, as we found out very quickly, was not enough to fund the government. The reason the tax benefits are sometimes given to the wealthy is because of certain kind of favors they play. But the reason that even if you were to tax them at higher levels, you just simply couldn't bring in enough money

[00:12:32] because the money, even though it's less in terms of amounts, it's more because it's the middle class. Lots of times people say, why is it that the tax requirements go all the way down to the middle class? Well, that's, again, the old line, why do you rob banks? Well, that's where the money is. And, again, the middle class ends up paying a very significant amount of the tax burden,

[00:12:59] even though on the top end you have the Elon Musk and a variety of other individuals paying there as well. Anyway, let's get to the issue of tariffs, and in particular China. Yesterday you heard me quote a little bit from Katie Pavlich, who actually was arguing that China finally gets its due, and she spent some time in her piece talking about the fact that we made a mistake.

[00:13:25] Even people in the Clinton administration now admit that they might have made a mistake in letting China into the World Trade Organization. That allowed China to do all sorts of things with very little scrutiny, including, as you point out, even allowing them to buy up American farmland next to sensitive military sites. They've acquired intellectual property.

[00:13:46] If you have watched at all some of the interviews being done right now on various talk shows about China, you've had a variety of individuals pointing out that they think it is really good that indeed China is being taxed at the moment on these tariffs because so many have told some really incredible stories about how that intellectual property was taken from them

[00:14:16] and used against them. And I'm going to give you some of that in just a minute when we go to these two pieces that we've posted. So this is, I think, another aspect of this. If indeed these tariffs do anything to separate China from the rest of the world, to isolate China, that may be good. Let's look at it in two ways. First, militarily, then economically. Militarily, can't do any better than going to Colonel Allen West.

[00:14:44] It is our second article. Actually, I guess technically our first article, since the other one was, of course, the Biblical Words book. So the first article by Colonel Allen West, How do you want to fight China? He says, Let's put all this silly pretense aside, he says, and come to the realization that communist China is our number one geopolitical foe.

[00:15:14] They see it as such. China has enacted such egregious actions against the United States since we foolishly enable them to enter into the World Trade Organization. So he's saying the same thing we just mentioned a minute ago. If you want to understand how they are stealing, I had some other words, but we'll just say how they were stealing intellectual property, look at the latest Chinese fighter,

[00:15:41] and it looks a lot like an F-35. Isn't that interesting? He goes on to say that China is openly killing Americans. He said, I first realized that when I was a member of Congress in Florida dealing with the Chinese drywall issue. China has unleashed, of course, a biological weapon attack through the Wuhan virus, he calls it, and now more recently a chemical weapon by the way of fentanyl, which has killed 250,000 of our citizens, including many young people,

[00:16:10] during this last administration. And he says China's at war with the United States. So we can talk about military. Let's talk economic, because he says the economic trade deficit created with the Chinese because we prefer a globalist agenda and cheap goods means that China now surpasses us in shipbuilding. China once had a no-blue-water navy can now boast multiple aircraft carriers and the ability to conduct large-scale amphibious operations.

[00:16:40] The hundreds of billions of dollars in trade deficit with China enabled them to have a vision called the One Belt, One Road Strategy, which we've talked about before. And, of course, then, the argument that he makes is that Donald Trump is wanting to defeat the Chinese communists just as Ronald Reagan defeated the Soviet Union and the Russian communists. And he says our lack of resolve, resilience,

[00:17:07] and strategic focus has brought us to this point. He says we can choose the means of fight, one in which we can deal with it economically, or we can call upon our men and women to take the field. He says, So that is his argument, and it's a pretty strong piece.

[00:17:38] Right next to it, Elaine Dazinski is an individual that has been writing about this as well. She is the senior director of the Center for Economic and Financial Power at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. We've interviewed many of her colleagues. And Elaine says, President Trump is launching a tariff blitz on the world for one reason, China. China's economy is built on a system that distorts free trade, she says. It's determined to grow at any cost.

[00:18:07] And, frankly, China has been overproducing everything. Then these goods are dumped on foreign markets, including America. And so, as a result, China has leveraged their cheap labor, oftentimes slave labor, and lacks environmental standards to flood the world with low-cost goods displaced in American industries. More than three and a half million U.S. jobs have been lost to China, she says.

[00:18:33] In 2023, a Chinese company announced a new factory in China, where one year later, Michigan's national standard, a leading wire manufacturer, shut down after 117 years in business. She goes into how they just drove them out of the market. Over the last decade, China's economic model accelerated using transferred, in quotes, technology from Western companies to push out our competitors, costing American companies, and we've heard this before,

[00:19:03] anywhere from $225 billion to $600 billion a year. Intellectual property theft and other unfair practices, she says, allowed China to advance from a low-quality goods to a high-tech manufacturing in areas like computing, robotics, and semiconductors. China aims to dominate global markets through a non-market strategy, such as subsidies, currency manipulation, monopolies, and restrictions on foreign companies that would be operating in China.

[00:19:32] The Chinese car company right now that is being built in Jingzhou is a sprawl over 50 square miles, basically the size of San Francisco, and 10 times the size of Tesla's largest factory. When you start seeing Chinese cars in this country, and they are pushing out Chinese, I mean American, and even Japanese car manufacturers, pay attention. In 2021, China produced nearly one-third of the world's goods,

[00:20:01] and experts predict it could rise to 43% by 2050 without intervention. They're flooding the market with their products, and at a lower cost, people tend to want to buy those, and various producers and retailers and wholesalers want to buy them as well. And so she makes the case that China's strategy has damaged America's industrial sectors, but they're not alone. European, Japanese,

[00:20:31] and South Korean companies also find themselves up against Chinese champions that manufacture entire supply chains, screens, semiconductors, memory chips, batteries, cameras, and cases. And so as a result, China export dumping has hurt economies globally from Brazil to South Africa, and half of that dumping was aimed at trying to dominate the market. So again, the argument being made is that if we don't

[00:21:01] do something, if we don't implement some kind of global tariff regime, China will continue to flood the world with cheap Chinese exports, and certainly dominate the world economically, and of course they want to dominate the world militarily. It is our enemy. That's what you need to know. You might read these two articles and learn a little bit more. We'll take a break, come back with more right after this.

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[00:23:02] The opinions expressed on Point of View do not necessarily reflect the views of the management or staff of this station. And now, here again, is Kirby Anderson. Once again, let me, if I can, point you to the website for a couple of minutes and that is, of course, my Viewpoints commentary is about Tax Day. Of course, we have information about the book by Dr. Tom Hobson. We talked about First Hour Fun with Biblical Words. But you will notice we've also, and I want to thank Karen for doing this,

[00:23:30] posted the particular statement that came from Donald Trump and the White House presidential message on Holy Week 2025. We did mention that yesterday, but that's a banner that we have up there right now. So if you have not had a chance to read it, that has generated quite an interesting response. If for no other reason than, as Gary Bauer pointed out, and I hadn't really thought about this, this time last year during Easter, President Biden spent time talking about

[00:24:00] the Day of Visibility for Transgenderism instead of talking about Easter or the Holy Week. So just a little bit of difference there. So you can read it for yourself of what President Trump's message was to the American people. Right beneath it is something we've been talking about since last Friday, but again, I know some of you tune in and tune out, and if you're just tuning in and are not aware, we have a new take action item, and that is to contact your member of Congress about the

[00:24:28] Dismantle DEI Act. Now, why do we suggest that? Well, already, the administration under, of course, the executive order by Donald Trump and the administration has begun to dismantle DEI, and number one, as we've pointed out before, if indeed this is an executive order, a future president could change that with a new executive order. So that's why I think it needs to be the law of the land. But here's the other issue. If you haven't been paying attention,

[00:24:58] Harvard University says, well, you have said that we're supposed to dismantle DEI in our admissions. We're not going to do it. So Donald Trump says, well, you know what? We will not allow you to get federal grants. And Harvard University says, okay, we will get federal grants, which I think either shows they're very stupid, which they're not, or the fact that they have such enormous endowments. And I must admit, having gone to an Ivy League school myself,

[00:25:28] the endowments of Harvard and Yale and Princeton, places like that, just unbelievable. They really could survive for a long time without any government money at all. But, you know, they'd have to obey if it became the law of the land. And again, they could argue right now, well, this is just what Donald Trump wants to do. If this goes to the House of Representatives and is voted on, and this goes to the United States Senate and is voted on, and it's passed by the House and the Senate and signed by the President, then it's

[00:25:58] the law of the land. It changes everything. So, for those of you that say, well, I think the executive order is enough, I'm not so sure that it is. And so, if you haven't taken the time, go to the website, pointofview.net. There's a black button there that says Take Action. And then you can scroll down and see us giving you some information. There's a place for your contact information. And if you've done this before, I apologize, we now have a different service, so you'll have to enter

[00:26:27] your information again. then we have a suggested letter. Then you can click on the button, send, or if you say, well, I still like to use the mail, you can click on the button that says print and mail, put a stamp on it, mail it off, or you can even preview it, so it gives you a lot more options. But again, that's all available at the website pointofview.net. During this Holy Week, I think it'd be good to read what the President has posted for us to read. It would also be

[00:26:57] good before we get into, of course, Good Friday and Easter to maybe take the time to take action, and we've given you an opportunity to do that. Let's get to our next article. It is our third article, and it's by our good friend Tony Perkins. Tony Perkins, of course, the head of Family Research Council, and it's entitled, Will America Divide End in Violence or Civility? We're a divided nation right now, no one doubts that, but he begins by giving us a speech

[00:27:26] given by, at that time, candidate Abraham Lincoln when he was running for U.S. Senate. And in June 1858, Abraham Lincoln speaking at the Illinois State Capitol, interestingly enough, talked about a house divided against itself cannot stand, drawing, of course, upon some of the words of Jesus in, of course, the Sermon on the Mount. And so, Tony Perkins argues that Lincoln recognized that a nation split against

[00:27:56] itself could not remain that way indefinitely, and of course, he was proven right. We had the Civil War. Bringing a country back together cost an immeasurable toll in lives, but unity eventually prevailed. He says, we're divided today, and first we've seen what we would call the cancel culture, and we've written about this. I've recommended very good books on this subject that have come out by Joe Dallas and even one by Sean McDowell

[00:28:25] on the cancel culture, but now we're talking about this assassination culture, and that is of concern. It comes from the survey, which we mentioned yesterday, NCRI, and Rutgers University, assassination culture, how burning Teslas and killing billionaires became a meme aesthetic for political violence, and it was based upon a survey, a reputable survey of more than 1,200 U.S.

[00:28:55] adults, and what they found, and you've heard me mention them, but let me talk about them again, that they found that, for example, those who identified as left of center left-leaning respondents, 45.2% felt that assassinating President Trump could be justified to some extent, partially justified, and interesting enough, 17% said justified, they didn't even say

[00:29:25] partially, they just said justified. Another 48%, 48.6% believe murdering Elon Musk was justified, and then another 57%, again a majority thought that even destroying Tesla dealerships was at least partially acceptable. And so in the midst of this, how has the press reacted? Well, either they've ignored this, or they've actually said just the opposite. I was thinking

[00:29:54] of grabbing this audio clip, but I'll just simplify it because it was hard to hear. Somebody on CNN says, you know, the greatest threat we have right now is from the right. Wait a minute, these are individuals left of center that said this, and to make his case, he argued that, well, look at the violence of January 6th. Well, again, you can have a debate on how many people died on January 6th. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez says 10. I think most people would

[00:30:23] say one. I won't even get into the debate there, but the one that died right there was shot by the Capitol Police. The other example they used was Oklahoma City bombing. If some of you are younger saying, that's in the history books, yeah, that happened 30 years ago. We have at least one or two people on staff that aren't even that old. So if you have to reach back 30 years to say, and again, that was a nut case anyway, to say that that's

[00:30:53] right-wing violence, I think you're missing the obvious of what's going on right now. And of course, as then, Tony Perkins, we'll rejoin his piece, says we're seeing a dangerous shift, he says, in this idea of assassination being normalized. He says we've seen Tesla dealerships vandalized. We see the murder of executives like Brian Thompson of United Healthcare met with approval in certain circles.

[00:31:23] We talked about that on Friday. We talked about it again yesterday. Extremism begets extremism, and the future of our national house, he says, stands on precarious grounds. He says history and scripture are unequivocal. A house or a nation divided cannot stand for long. And so his resolution is civility, something we've talked about before. Civility, he says, means treating others

[00:31:53] as we ourselves would want to be treated. Civility is basically the golden rule. And he says, this is not a call to surrender compromise on vital mortal truths. Genuine unity cannot be built on falsehood. Instead, it is an invitation to take deliberate humanizing steps, share a meal, have a cup of coffee, simply engage in sincere conversation with someone whose cultural or political perspectives sharply differ

[00:32:22] from your own. government. We were hoping to have Robert George on yesterday to talk about his book and what he has done with Cornel West. Didn't happen. Maybe we can get him on in the future. But if nothing else, we have a choice. Violence or civility. And if nothing else, this has become even more intense because now we know the name of the individual who went into the Pennsylvania governor's mansion and wanted to

[00:32:50] actually not only burn it down, but said the hammer I had to actually break the windows, if I had run into the governor Shapiro, Governor Shapiro, Josh Shapiro, I would have beat him to death with the hammer. And so as some people have pointed out, you know, we're a nation of 340 million people and some people are screwy. And some people are going to do some pretty bizarre things. But when you can't even get

[00:33:20] Democratic leaders to speak out against the destruction of Teslas, you can't get individuals to speak out against a survey which now says that people that are left-leaning think it is justifiable to murder Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Unfortunately, you're going to have more of this, and it's time for civility and time for moral courage to speak out against this. We'll be right back.

[00:33:55] You're listening to Point of View, your listener-supported source for truth. Back for a few more minutes, let me just mention tomorrow we're going to kind of do a little bit like what we did today. In the first hour we talked about fun with biblical words. Tomorrow we're going to talk about the Bible I never knew because sometimes we take verses out of context, and we thought especially during whole week we will certainly talk about news in the second hour, but also talk about how important it is to spend time in God's Word as we talk about

[00:34:24] Good Friday and Easter coming up, Resurrection Day. Those are important issues as well, so we don't want to forget where we are in the church calendar, if you will, the liturgical calendar, so we certainly will cover some of that tomorrow. Then get back into issues in the news. There's a lot to cover, and we will certainly do that as well. Last piece comes from Don Fetter. He has been a columnist who it's been a while since we've had him on. He used to write for the Boston Herald, and didn't

[00:34:54] even now know that he was writing for the Washington Times, so maybe whenever we get Robert Knight on, maybe every once in a while we should get Don Fetter on, I didn't realize he was still writing his column. But this one says, what do the anti-Doge protesters want? He says they want our wallet, not our freedom. It's our fourth article, you can read it in its entirety, but let me summarize it, because it brings us back to trying to understand what's going on. He is a columnist,

[00:35:23] he's probably my age, and has been writing for some time, brings a lot of wisdom, and he says whenever you see a demonstration, you need to ask two questions. Who is behind it, and what do they really want? He says in the case of these anti-Doge protests, 1,300 of them in one weekend this month, the driving force is spending interest. The Democratic Party, teachers unions, a variety of special interest groups promoting issues such

[00:35:52] as abortion, transgender surgery, their spend-ins are lovingly covered by the legacy media. As an individual that has worked in Boston and certainly looked at some of that, he recognizes that. Of course, the slogan right now is hands-off, means hands-off big government. They want spending, debt, and taxes, and all the rest. I'll get to that in just a minute because you only can maintain that if you think that we're

[00:36:20] maybe balancing the budget, and you've heard me point out that we're not. And it's amazing to me how many people, even in elected office, do not know that. And so, if anything, we can educate you about this. Anyway, Don Federer goes on to say, don't ask bureaucrats to defend their performance. Don't worry about the national debt or the impact of the growing burden of debt and taxes on the economy and middle class. He says, need you say, trust us, they seem to

[00:36:49] say, even though we got you into this mess, it's in our best interest to keep you there. So grab a sign, scream obscenities about the Trump dictatorship, curse Elon Musk, burn a Tesla. And he says, again, the goal of Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency, is to cut two trillion dollars from the federal budget. First of all, I don't think it's going to happen. I'd like to believe that it is, but it's going to have to, a lot of this is going to have to pass Congress and Congress is going to

[00:37:19] have weak knees and weak spines. But if they do it, great. Why do we need to cut two trillion dollars? It's because, you've heard me say it before, let me say it again, we're bringing in five trillion dollars in revenue. You just pay your taxes today, right? And we're spending seven trillion out. Now, if you were to not have all the spending that occurred over the last four years, and one of those years under Donald Trump during

[00:37:48] pandemic, we were at five trillion dollar budget. So if we were where we were, five trillion dollars would probably be enough. But five trillion dollars does not cover the seven trillion dollars. And so this would be the first time in 24 years we would balance the budget. That's the first place where I disagree with Don. We didn't really balance the budget under Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich. What we did was we took money from the Social Security Trust

[00:38:17] Fund to balance it. So technically we didn't even balance it then. But that's a minor offense there. And he goes on to say our one target for the acts is the federal workforce. And he points out the Supreme Court just allowed the president to fire 16,000 probationary workers workers because after all we have so many people in the federal government. He says of the three million civilian federal employees over 40 percent of

[00:38:45] them earn $90,000 or more annually. Now I remember the other day when I think Dr. Merrill Matthews talked about how indeed many people that work in government are paid very well. We had somebody call and say well I'm not paying well and I recognize when you're further down the ladder on civil service. Yes you aren't paid as well but look at that number. $90,000 pretty high. 40,000 or 40 percent

[00:39:13] earn $90,000 or more. The average private sector salary is $63,000. You can kind of see there is a difference. And after only five years on the job a federal worker can retire with a pension at age 62. So the point he's making is is that if you look at how we have spent even last year $6 trillion in real dollars that means that spending has grown 58 percent since 1983. But the point he goes on to make is your federal taxes pay for

[00:39:42] and then he goes through this long list of all sorts of things that Doge has uncovered. And the fact is is that a billion here a billion there if you can paraphrase Everett Dirksen it talks ends up being real money. Then he says well the national debt is almost as large as the entire U.S. economy. That's where I say okay I just have to disagree with you Don because the national debt is 36 trillion almost 37 trillion dollars. Our gross domestic

[00:40:11] product is 27 trillion just looked on the national debt clock if you go to debtclock.com you'll find that they have 29 trillion what's a trillion dollars amongst friends but whether it's 27 trillion or 29 trillion that is less than 36 trillion. So our national debt is much more than the U.S. economy. He's right about the next point. Interest on the debt is the third largest item on the federal budget behind Social

[00:40:41] Security and Medicare and borrowing to cover the debt raises interest rates and as we pointed out just the other day nine trillion dollars in treasuries and bonds. We had an auction the other day didn't go that well and so in some respects that is the case. So he then takes on the fact that David Stockman who is the first director of office and managed budget under Ronald Reagan says that's not going to work but he's at least

[00:41:11] hopeful that Elon Musk and especially Donald Trump will have even more resilience to try to win over that case because if you don't as he says we're headed for the abyss at 90 miles an hour and if we don't do something soon as Elon Musk has said and Donald Trump and others have said we will be in a difficult situation. So what kind of world do you want to

[00:41:40] give to your children? What kind of world do you want to give to your grandchildren? And I think that's something to think about. Well let me end with something that might bring a smile to your face. You remember the Dilbert cartoons cartoons. Scott Adams of Dilbert cartoon fame has always had some fun representing some conservative ideas and the other day he suggested that we might found a new government agency.

[00:42:09] It's called the Department of Imaginary Concerns which would then take all the whining and complaining from individuals and as a result talked about the imaginary concerns about cutting Medicare. The imaginary concerns about the fact that Social Security is going to be robbed and all the other imaginary concerns going all the way back of course to even the so-called Russia-Russia collusion hoax and all the rest.

[00:42:39] So maybe he's right. The creator of Dilbert, the cartoon, Scott Adams says maybe it's time to create one more agency in addition to DOGE, the Department of Imaginary Concerns and you can bring your complaints to them. Well that's all we have for today. We'll get back into some Bible interpretation tomorrow. I think you'll enjoy that. I want to thank Megan for her help engineering the program. Steve, thank you for producing the program. See you back here tomorrow right here on Point of View.

[00:43:11] It almost seems like we live in a different world from many people in positions of authority. They say men can be women and women men. People are prosecuted differently or not at all depending on their politics. Criminals are more valued and rewarded than law-abiding citizens. It's so overwhelming, so demoralizing. You feel like giving up. But we can't. We shouldn't. We must not. As Winston Churchill said

[00:43:40] to Britain in the darkest days of World War II, never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. And that's what we say to you today. This is not a time to give in, but to step up and join Point of View in providing clarity in the chaos. We can't do it alone, but together, with God's help, we will overcome the darkness.

[00:44:10] Invest in biblical clarity today at pointofview.net or call 1-800-347-5151 pointofview.net and 800-347-5151 Point of View is produced by Point of View Ministries. Point of View Ministries 1-800-347-5151