SPEAKER_01 0:02

The balance budget amendment in the Senate failed by one vote.

SPEAKER_00 0:10

How much roughly is that debt per U.S. citizen?

SPEAKER_01 0:14

Something close to $120,000 each. I actually think there's an easier pathway to a better future than what people realize. Right now, as you're listening to this sentence, the United States government is borrowing about $5 million. Not this episode, this sentence.

SPEAKER_00 0:38

And Dan, I heard that for the first time since World War II, the U.S. is spending more to pay its interest on debt than it does on the entire U.S. military.

SPEAKER_01 0:48

Yeah. Yikes. Well, welcome everybody to Abundant. Conversations about the life that everyone's actually looking for and what's getting in the way. I'm Dan Jarvis with my friend Del Fasenfeld, and today we're tackling the national debt. Now, this won't just be 40 minutes of scary numbers, although we do have a few of those to share. What we actually want to talk about is a proverb written 3,000 years ago that I think America needs to hear. Not just American government officials need to, we need to hear it as citizens. And it goes like this the borrower is servant to the lender. And we're not going to have an abundant future as a nation if we're serving lenders. So here we go. Dell, one of the things that is, I think, hard to grasp is just the sheer scale of our economy, you know, which you could say is positive. I'm glad we have 300 million people all out there earning money and trading, and trillions of dollars are swirling around out there just in our country. And then of course, globally, it's even more than that. But in the midst of all that, when we say someone borrowed a billion here or wasted on fraud, a hundred million over there, it just kind of blends together, and I don't even know if we realize what we're saying.

SPEAKER_00 2:02

I agree. I don't I was never great at math. But what is a trillion, anyways? I mean, realistically, for an average guy like me, I don't even know how to make sense out of one trillion.

SPEAKER_01 2:14

Yeah, I don't think there's a way in our mind's eye to picture something like a trillion of anything. If you wanted to just think about the math practically, you could start with a thousand dollars and get that in your mind and say, okay, a thousand thousands is a million, which sounds great. That's what we all hope we'll make next year, right? If you could do that a thousand times, that would be a billion. A thousand millions is a billion. So now you need a thousand billions to make a trillion. And the US government collects five of those from all of us in taxes every year, which you'd think would be a lot of money. The problem is they spend seven of those every year. Across our whole economy, you know, thirty-five of those are floating around as we all conduct business. And so, yeah, a trillion is hard to comprehend. And part of the reason I think that we've fallen into I think what you could honestly say is like a black hole of debt at this point as a culture, is that it's so astronomical that the average person just kind of shrugs and goes, Well, I hope somebody, you know, some banker or some congressperson out there is doing the right thing, but I don't even know how to think about all these numbers.

SPEAKER_00 3:29

Yeah, I think you had me fried at a thousand billion. I'm still stuck and my mind's melding and to think that we do that times five or seven or whatever you said mind-blowing.

SPEAKER_01 3:40

Oh, it's amazing. So if you break down the federal budget and say, well, what are we spending all that money on? One of the challenges is that the the things that make headlines, like oh, you know, some fraudulent program or wasteful spending or some tax increase or decrease, some of those things have kind of an emotional dynamic to them, but the math isn't emotional. The math doesn't care. Most of the spending is actually on things that Congress can't easily change. It's not something you could simply cut. We're spending it on promises we made to the elderly. I mean, frankly, that's literally what most of the budget is at this point. So I made a list. If you were trying to really simplify it down, say, what are we spending all this money on? Roughly a trillion and a half is on Social Security. Another trillion on top of that is Medicare and other health-related programs. A trillion is on national defense. And of course, if you go to war, you need even more than that. This year, which this is this is one of the scary things, a trillion or more we're spending on interest on the debts we've already accumulated. And then whatever's left over from that is what we're spending on all other functions of government, whether that's the salary of a congressman or whatever the federal building in your local area or repairs on a federal highway, the new paint job in Washington, DC, all that stuff fits into the rest of it. So when we talk about cutting any of that, you immediately get a lot of emotion, right? Because you look at that list, you say, well, what could you cut? And people are willing to debate about the extras, but most people would just shut down the conversation about the big ticket items. The problem is those are the things that are driving all of this crazy spending and pushing us further over this cliff into debt.

SPEAKER_00 5:27

So the cumulative effect of all that spending and the inability to kind of balance the revenue with the expenses has resulted in this thing that we call our national debt. Right. And it's at, I think, a $40 trillion as of this year.

SPEAKER_01 5:43

It crossed as of as of like a week ago from the time of this recording. It crossed the $40 trillion marker, which you know is a notable, it's not a goal any of us were aiming at. I remember pretty clearly when it hit $10 trillion, and everybody thought that was the end of the world. Back in the 90s, I think it was somewhere in the $5 trillion range. And there was actually an amendment being proposed to the Constitution to have a balanced budget so that the debt could never grow out of control from that point forward because people sort of saw this day coming. And I don't know if you know this. I followed politics pretty closely back in that time. I was an early teen, I was really getting into it. The balanced budget amendment in the Senate failed by one vote. They almost had the supermajority needed to advance that. And our whole timeline would be different if that one vote had flipped. And today we wouldn't be sitting on a mountain of 40 trillion in debt, which one of the debates about all of this is how much is too much? You know, when like is it okay to have that much debt? It's kind of like an individual. You'd say, well, could you have a mortgage on your house? Sure. Could you have a car loan? Maybe, I guess. Could you take out a personal loan? Probably. But eventually, if you start adding those things together and on top of one another, you might cross some sort of a threshold where now it's unhealthy or now there's a point of no return where you're like, wow, I don't I don't even have the capacity to make enough money to service all these debts.

SPEAKER_00 7:10

Yeah, because the the debt keeps accumulating. And it sounds like from what you're saying, it's actually picking up speed in terms of how fast it's starting to accumulate and maybe even double. You mentioned not too long ago it was 10 trillion.

SPEAKER_01 7:25

Yeah. How fast it's 10 years ago it was 20 trillion, now it's 40. Estimates are that before 2030 rolls around, so what is that four years? It'll be at 50 trillion, and then from there, the the pace of growth keeps accelerating. And there's a lot of factors driving that. The baby boom retirement is pulling more out of Medicare and Social Security. I mean, there's there's all sorts of structural problems built into all this. Defending America is costing more, high-tech weaponry costs more, paying soldiers well costs more. Wow, you could just you could go down through the list and you could start to understand why there's there's nothing obviously that fixes this. The scary issue is that if people lose confidence in the U.S. government to pay its debts or they lose confidence in the currency, the next thing that happens is they start wanting more in interest to loan, which that's exactly what happens personally, right? If the bank trusts you, you get a great rate. If the bank doesn't trust you, you pay through the nose. Well, that's starting to happen to our government. Long-term bond rates, treasury rates are going up, which means that now not only do we need to still borrow like another $2 trillion next year, but now we have to resell the $40 trillion in debt as it comes to maturity at higher interest rates, which kicks the bill for all of this even higher. And there's sort of a point of no return, I guess, you know, kind of going back to the black hole illustration, you cross the event horizon, you can't get out from there, where suddenly the pace of interest growth is faster than you can make up for. And that's the scary thing that could happen to America at some point in the near future.

SPEAKER_00 9:04

So the reason that that every American should be concerned about this topic is that our national deficit is accelerating, it's accumulating at unprecedented rates. It's forecasted to keep accelerating in terms of how fast it accumulates. I think the last trillion that we added to the national deficit only took five months. So if we just start doing that math, you can start to see that this 40 trillion isn't going to be static. Right. So, Dan, if you were to break that astronomical dump number, keep in mind we're talking about a thousand billion times forty and onward to uh a bill that one of us would get or each of us would get as Americans, how much roughly is that debt per US citizen?

SPEAKER_01 9:52

If you were going with today's numbers, it's something close to $120,000 each for all of us, which means if you're born in America today, before you can even speak English, before you even take your first breath, you're already $120,000 in the hole and counting and counting quickly. I know some people can disconnect their thinking from what's going on in Washington, D.C. And they just think, ah, you know, it doesn't matter to me. But for me, my own personal sense of long-term planning is sort of depressed by this sense that America itself is in an unsustainable position. So when I think about my kids, for example, I have a seven-year-old daughter, and I think, what is her life going to be in 20 years? 20 years, how many trillion will the debt be? Well, at some point, that math stops mattering. Either people won't lend it, the government can't print anymore, it just kind of inflates the value of existing currency away. Things just start to come apart, the wheels come off. And so I have this impending sense of doom, but I don't know when it's going to happen. So then you go, well, I'll wake up tomorrow and keep doing the right thing. But for my own psychological health, I feel like I need to have a different frame on what do we do about all this and what could the country do to fix it or to get on a better course? But then how should we as citizens be engaging?

SPEAKER_00 11:15

Yeah, there is a certain psychology when you fall into the kind of the mindset of buy now, pay later. And it affects maybe a culture itself. But you know, when you get down to the personal level, it may start affecting the way that you even think about tomorrow. You might actually be paralyzed on one level by sort of dread. You mentioned the word doom. On the other hand, you might just say, Well, what does it matter if I make a responsible choice? I'm just going to join the parade and live for right now and let the future generations, you know, take care of themselves.

SPEAKER_01 11:46

Yeah. Well, and at this point, we're not even talking about future generations. We're just talking about our future selves. Us 15 years from now, we'll have to pay the price somehow for whatever it is we're doing right now. I really think that the gravy train is coming to an end and no one really knows what's next. When you think about the psychology of people who have, for whatever reason, given up hope in their circumstance, what are some of the things that you tell them to help them reframe, to help them regain a sense of hope and future and momentum to go forward?

SPEAKER_00 12:18

I think it really is true that uh even one little candle can light up a really dark room. And so I think obviously we're going to have to have uh a whole group of individuals who sort of show a different way of living and a different path forward if we're going to change trajectory on the scale that we're talking about it. There's going to take a lot of us personally that have to add up to collective change. And I also just think, you know, what I would tell a person is that when you're facing monumental sorts of problems that seem so much bigger than you can possibly even comprehend, it's so important to not lose your own sense of personal agency. Feels to me that when you've really lost the battle with despair completely is when it feels to you that there's nothing that you can do as a person that affects the outcome in any way. That's a terrible place to be. I don't think any of us psychologically or spiritually are ever in a position where we've completely lost the ability to take responsibility for our own choices and our own sense of agency.

SPEAKER_01 13:19

Yeah. Okay. So I'd like to do a couple different things in this episode. One would be what does the Bible say about nations in debt and people in debt? There's some wisdom there. Also, when it comes to our personal agency, our ability to make our own decisions and feel like we have some sort of impact on the future of our own lives. I'd like to talk about what we can do, not just in the face of the national debt, but maybe what we could rightly call a debt-financed culture that we're all living in, because it's not just the U.S. federal government that has a large debt. At every level of society, people are overwhelmed with what they've borrowed in the past, trying to have the good life today, not able to prioritize correctly, and then they feel like they're trapped. And exactly what you said, once you get to some place where you've given up hope, then you think, well, why bother at all? I might as well see what else I can squeeze out of this moment, and then I'll pay all the price later. What a hopeless place to be. So we want to get out of all that. In this episode, I definitely can say that we don't have the mathematical solution for the 40 trillion that our government owes, but I would like to offer a path forward, even for that, because I think there is one, and some of it is going to come from a little bit of a change of heart that we all have to have on either side of the political fence. It would be possible to make forward progress, but it would take a change of heart. I don't even know if it's that complicated. I'm just not sure why we can't go for it. So I'd I'd like to propose that as we conclude today in a little bit. So some of the biblical references that have to do with nations in debt, Deuteronomy frames debt as the evidence of a nation's downfall or almost like a curse on a nation versus blessing would a blessed nation would be the kind of nation that could lend to others or give to others. A cursed nation, a falling nation, a declining nation would be the one that has to borrow to survive. And sadly, over the last 50 years, we I think we switched positions in that regard.

SPEAKER_00 15:23

Yeah, and I think another scripture, Dan, that speaks pretty importantly to the moment we find ourselves in comes out of the Psalms where it just talks about how the wicked, like kind of what really makes something wicked is when it comes to finances, is a person who borrows and doesn't repay. And I think you can you could sort of have two kind of nuances to how that would happen. I mean, one is that you actually get yourself in over your head and are unable to repay, right? It's like you didn't take the forethought, you made one bad decision that then compounded by further but bad decisions, you gave up hope and you actually lost control of the whole thing and you were unable to repay. But I think there's another like aspect to it where some people actually enter debt with such a careless mindset that at some deepest part of them, maybe they never really intended to repay. It's sort of a way of like trying to take advantage of a situation or a moment or another person in a way that the irresponsibility even goes a bit deeper. Like you don't even intend to repay. And I do think when you start getting into $40 trillion, you know, the largest military on earth, the largest economy on earth, the ability to set basically the dollar is the standard, you know, for the world's sort of price points. You start to have to ask the question do we still have the will as a culture and the intention to actually honor our commitments and to take responsibility for our debt and to actually repay it? And that's probably where you were referring to this idea that trust is really the economy. It's like the ability to actually trust each other's word, to actually believe that there will be integrity and follow-through. That's sort of the underpinnings of what gives any of our currency value, anyways, is the trust factor. And really, we're starting to play with trust on a catastrophic scale. And I think we have to come to a reckoning as a nation and really starting with ourselves. Like, are we going to be the kind of people who actually honor our commitments? Are we wicked? Or will we actually follow through and do what it takes to repay?

SPEAKER_01 17:25

Yeah. You know, there's three schools of thought out there about how to address America's finances, and all three, I think, fall for that trap. No one is saying, let's, as a matter of honor or character, start paying this thing off. Nobody's saying that. You have the right wing, which would say, let's grow our economy so that we can handle the debt, you know, which there's there's something to be said for that. We we need the economy to keep growing if we're going to sustain this level of debt. But that's not about paying it off. That's just about making the debt seem relatively smaller compared to the size of the economy. Then you have on the left wing, let's tax the billionaires. But if you listen carefully, I don't think I've heard any politician say, let's tax the billionaires in order to pay something off. They're saying let's tax the billionaires so that we can start more programs on top of all the things we already have happening. So they're not looking to shrink anything, they're looking to grow it. And then the third school of thought, which to me is the scariest, I just read this in an economic analysis the other day, and I thought this is the first time I've seen a credible source say this, but to me, it's bad news for the future of whether we can trust America or not. They were basically tracking who earns the interest on our debt. So we're paying all this interest, who are we paying it to? And he was circling it back to, oh, we're paying it to the wealthy. Maybe they don't deserve it. Maybe that I'm thinking, are you serious? You would actually start to build a case for default and say that it's the right thing to do, that we're just not going to pay our debt because the person who loaned us the money doesn't really need the money. Man, that's bad news. From a moral perspective, I think who who is out there with the courage to say, no, we should actually evaluate what is the right thing to do.

SPEAKER_00 19:10

Yeah, it's really interesting that underneath even what we might say is purely economic conversations, there's these deeper values and principles. In Romans 13, the scripture says in verses seven and eight, to pay what you owe and to owe nothing but love. That's interesting, isn't it? That maybe underneath some of the dynamics that are related to debt and repayment is this other-centered perspective versus a self-centered perspective. Maybe it's at the heart of it all is actually like what kind of person are we becoming, and are we going to actually put the principle of giving and receiving love at the center of even our economy?

SPEAKER_01 19:50

Right. Something that I it might be worth a whole nother discussion sometime, but I think it's interesting. One of the arguments that people will use to expand government is that we're supposed to be loving and compassionate. And yet, in the scenario we're in, we're not talking about the government with positive cash flow using that cash that they have to help someone. I could be persuaded on that. But what we're really talking about is should we borrow even more money to then give it away? And that just seems crazy. At some level, somebody has to have some common sense, right? So Proverbs says, and I'd mentioned at the beginning of the program in uh chapter 22, the borrower is servant to the lender. I think when you take on a debt, you are presuming on the future. You're presuming on future productivity, you're presuming on future taxpayers. If you yourself take on a debt for the future, you're presuming that, you know, you'll still have a job in those, the number of years it's going to take for you to pay that debt off. Not every debt like that is a bad gamble, but you'd have to admit there is a sense of a gamble. Here, our country is taking on enormous debt with no real sense that there would ever be a way to outpace it. And to me, that you're right, there's a moral dynamic there I think we should reckon with of a personal repentance against things like envy and greed and sloth. And then we come back and say, now we fix the math, but from a totally different framework in our head.

SPEAKER_00 21:12

Yeah, I think it's really important, you know, to me at this state of the conversation to really zero in on the fact that we're not actually talking about how much money we should give away. It this is not about a left or right kind of political conversation. We can have that conversation kind of separately in terms of just what do we want to do to to exercise our values in the way that we allocate public spending. This is actually about the prospect that we would actually get ourselves into a generational quandary that we spend so much of really the future capital of our collective country that we literally are unable to pay, not just in our generation, but possibly we just pass the bill on to our grandkids.

SPEAKER_01 21:58

Right. If you're right or left, and I I mean some of these issues would probably cross the aisle, but it would be in everyone's best interest for the government to be fiscally strong. So if you're on the left, and maybe you're saying, I want to see social programs expanded, or I want everybody to have medical insurance, say that's a notable goal, but that will cost money that someone has to earn, someone has to make and budget for. So where will that money come from? Now, if you're on the right, you say, wow, you know, maybe we're not so interested in doing insurance, but we we want to have an ultra-futuristic military, or we want to go to Mars, or we want to do all these amazing things. All that sounds great too. But guess what? That's all really expensive. And if for anybody to win in the future, the government having strong books, strong the ability to pay its commitments, all of that is fundamental and necessary.

SPEAKER_00 22:53

It's almost like a wisdom conversation, isn't it? Yeah. It's, you know, and Jesus actually commented on this related to decisions that we make about the future, that we should at least do it with awareness and with careful intention. So this is sort of an old metaphor, but he said, you know, you should know the state of your flocks. Yeah, right. Um before the cost. Right. Yeah. You should count before you build a building, you should actually count the cost of what it's going to cost. So Jesus sort of assumes that wisdom is sort of tied to accounting.

SPEAKER_01 23:23

Yeah, right. Well, and we've even found clever ways to do that. I don't know if you're familiar with the CBO, the Congressional Budget Office. Anytime a bill comes before Congress, the CBO will score the bill based on a 10-year time horizon. They'll say, here's how much this will really cost. Well, part of the problem is you're starting programs that last longer than 10 years. So the 10-year time horizon is usually the cheapest 10 years that that program will ever have. It'll be astronomically more expensive later. But it also is scored based on that there won't be any economic shocks, that everything will be great, that, you know, best case scenarios of on a variety of other factors. And so even when we would say, oh, we are counting the cost, or we do have a long-term plan, just my experience having watched this all unfold for multiple generations of politicians, multiple administrations swinging from Democrat to Republican, is that everybody starts with the premise that they're going to lower the deficit and it's all going to be better and the economy is going to grow. And then everybody says at the end of their administration, oh, sorry, that didn't quite work out the way I was hoping. Uh now we're even deeper in debt. Now we're even further in the hole, and we hope that the next Congress or the next administration will take action. We have to change that. I was thinking about the proverb where it talks about the righteous person who leaves an inheritance to their children's children. Okay, so think about the math here. You're leaving an inheritance to your grandkids and the blessing that that would be. And if you think of even in life stages, when you're about ready to leave this world, if you think about the age of your grandkids, that that is a great age for them to get an inheritance that would really help them as they're probably raising young kids and getting ready to try to make their mark on the world. It's almost like we have the opposite going on, where we're not leaving an inheritance to our grandchildren. We're actually leaving them a debt that they can't escape because it doesn't get written off and disappear when we all die. It carries on. It's not going anywhere. It will long outlive any of us. So what do we do about all of that?

SPEAKER_00 25:25

I know as we've been talking about this, I can feel my chest started getting tight here. And I'm feeling that doom that you mentioned a minute ago coming on me. I'm like, oh my gosh, like, you know, I just had our first grand, we just had our first grandchild. And I'm thinking, well, I've got my $117,000 debt. My wife's got her $117,000 debt that is not being resolved in our lifetime. So we're passing on that $300,000 debt. Plus, she's got her $117,000 debt and presumably her parents' $300,000 debt. So you're talking about that reverse uh inheritance, you know, congratulations. You have a $750,000 bill for your first birthday.

SPEAKER_01 26:03

Yeah. Well, and there's more, right? Because we're in midterm season here, and the politicians are out making new promises of even more that they want to do in the next cycle, which is going to accelerate all this even further. So we don't want to get stuck in the doom loop, although I would welcome you to that party because I've been I've been in that party for a long time, you know. And I think sometimes you just have to walk out in the sunshine and go, Lord, I'm so thankful for the world you've given us. And whether the country or the empire that I'm a part of rises or falls, the sun's still shining and I'm still glad for that. But here we are. We have to take responsibility for what we have and then go forward. I do think that the proverb is true that says, without a vision, the people perish. It's like if you lose a sense of where are we going from here and what does the future look like? If that starts to be doom and gloom, then you get faster deceleration than the CBO is ever going to project, right? Because the the economic growth slows down because you decide maybe I won't try so hard. Maybe it doesn't matter that much anyway. We're starting to see that with Gen Z, where you've got some that are out there based on the inflated economy we're living in that just kind of say, you know, it doesn't even matter if I go to school, if I work, I'm I'm never gonna get I'm not gonna overcome the debt mountain myself, let alone thinking about the government side of all this. So what can we do? If we were thinking some answers, some practical solutions for individuals, and then in whatever way we have the opportunity to advocate to government officials, what can we do?

SPEAKER_00 27:32

I think I think the first thing, and we've been kind of attacking this straight on, is that avoidance as a strategy, just not opening the bills as they pile up on your table, doesn't make them go away. So I think we've got to throw avoidance out the window and we've got to start becoming collectively more assertive about the conversation of practically what are we gonna do. And that also means getting rid of some avoidant thinking, which just we simply can't keep doing the same things that we've been doing for the last 50, 60 years and expect a different result. I think we'd all agree that that's the definition of insanity, like expecting something different without changing. And we certainly can't accelerate. So the politicians that are wanting to get elected obviously are incentivized to sort of try to make us more promises. But I think part of the, you know, the lack of getting rid of avoidance or getting rid of avoidance and becoming more assertive is to start at saying, like, don't tell us lies.

unknown 28:30

Right.

SPEAKER_00 28:31

Tell show us actually how the math works.

SPEAKER_01 28:34

We've normalized bad math for so long that we don't even recognize it's bad. One thing I notice, which I realize, some of the bankers and officials out there, their job is to keep everybody calm so the markets don't react negatively. But you know, that they'll just in a very calm voice say, Oh, yeah, you know, we're gonna run 5% deficit to GDP this year, use some economic speak. The problem is you're you're running that deficit for 10 years, 20 years, 30 years in a row. Suddenly it's not just 5%. You're looking at a debt that's bigger than the entire economy, which is what we literally have right now. So that's where I think we have to demand, we have to learn this a little bit personally so that we actually can challenge back that sometimes when you hear somebody make it sound like the solution's so easy, we're gonna, you know, raise a tax over here and pay for all this over there. Say, you know what? I'm not gullible enough to believe that anymore. That math doesn't work. That math isn't mathing, as they say. Yeah. So I wanted to offer two ways to think about this in a proactive, positive sense. And then let's make it personal. Let's talk about individuals. What could we do to escape that debt culture and maybe to find a little bit of our own freedom and agency going forward, regardless of what the U.S. government happens to do? So when it comes to solutions, I would say there's a moral track and there's a mathematical track. The moral track is what you were talking about, Dell. That's the reset of our heart, reset of our understanding. What does it even mean to be honest? What does it mean to have some character and some integrity about the things we're doing when we give our word and we say we're going to borrow something? Maybe we should actually be tying that to real world outcomes. Like we're not just borrowing money endlessly because it's ours to print and it's ours to borrow, but instead we're actually making the case that only in the most extreme circumstance would an already indebted nation borrow more. No, we would we would be willing to pay the price, which there would be a price, a personal price of getting less benefits from the government or being potentially taxed at a higher rate, so that we could pay down this debt, uh at least so that we could eliminate the deficit and be running a balanced budget. That feels like a minimum that we should be demanding of our politicians. But every cycle, people will talk about it and they never quite get there. So the the math solution, I actually think there's an easier pathway to a better future than what people realize. And it's it's right in between where the two parties sit. So somehow in the polarization of all of this, you you get this all or nothing mentality from both sides. So if you're on the right wing, you can never raise taxes because that will shrink the economy. Can't do it, no go, end of discussion. If you're on the left wing, you can never cut spending because somehow that would be cruel to somebody somewhere. Even if it's fraudulent spending, we're not allowed to talk about it, we can't cut it. It's ridiculous to have that kind of a dichotomy when obviously the answer is to do both of those things at the same time. It seems like in a world where we were usually frustrated by compromise, this would be the one area where you could genuinely sit down and make a 50-50 compromise and say, great, nobody's gonna be happy. And it's probably true for the next couple decades, we aren't gonna be as happy as we would be if we could spend endless money. That's true whether we acknowledge it or not. That's just reality. But we could decide in what way we'll make those sacrifices instead of letting circumstances dictate that on top of us. So you sit down, you start negotiating. Say, well, okay, we we may have to raise taxes on wealthier people, not to start new programs, but in order to pay down the debt or get the deficit under control. And at the same time, yes, we are enthusiastically going to root out waste and corruption, and we're going to cut programs that are less essential, just like you do in a personal budget, just like we would do here at our church, in our church's budget. You don't start from the premise that nothing can change. You put everything on the table and you say, you know what, all this stuff's important, or it wouldn't have been here to begin with. So of course we want a robust national defense, of course we want helpful so social safety nets, of course we want to fulfill the promises we've made to people. But if the math doesn't work, it doesn't work. And it doesn't matter what your words are. So I think there's a path forward there, but it would take a reset, right? Yeah, a political reset.

SPEAKER_00 32:47

I think to just kind of nail what you're saying, we need to go to we need to agree across the left and the right on one thing at least, that we need to get out of this crazy cycle. Like we can't we can't just keep avoiding and keep adding to the deficit.

SPEAKER_01 33:03

Right.

SPEAKER_00 33:04

So if we were to start with that agreement that we have to get out of this crazy cycle, then you're then you're poised for a very difficult conversation, but at least the right one about how we're gonna do it through some sort of creative compromise.

SPEAKER_01 33:17

The problem is people will point at the other guy and the other party and say it's all it's their fault. The debt is their fault. And to that I would answer, well, you're half right. Uh it is half their fault, and it's also half your fault. This literally is a two-party system for the most part. And if you look across the last 50 years, nobody has done the hard things that have been needed to be done. So we either start now and we get to determine how the future goes, or we keep waiting and eventually the future happens to us, probably in an even more difficult way than what you know, if it would be f it would make far more sense for us to sit down before it's a crisis and a catastrophe and start working towards some sort of resolution. So, really personally, how would we change our mentality? How would we start to operate differently so that even if Washington fails to adapt here, you and I could still have a positive future uh in whatever the country would look like going forward? What would be the different ways that we might tackle this?

SPEAKER_00 34:19

Yeah, it's really difficult to hold our politicians accountable to things that we have no experience or practice. You were just mentioning that all Americans need to increase their financial literacy. It's the responsibility of a citizen just to realize that together we've been creating massive debt. Together we've got to get out of the crazy cycle. But I think that also then has to extend the way you get that experience is actually by applying fiscal responsibility or money responsibility to your own budget. It is pretty astronomical the levels of debt that the average American is routinely in. There's all kinds of reasons for that. Don't want to be insensitive to some of the dynamics that cause people to get behind. Sure. But we're talking about something that's more than just getting behind. We're talking about, in a lot of cases, consumer spending that is just far outpacing budget.

SPEAKER_01 35:15

Like a perennial disregard for money itself, just assuming it'll keep working out and all I have to do is think about my monthly payments. And there are so many tidbits of financial wisdom that are available so freely out there. Personally, I listen to the Dave Ramsey podcast here and there just to stay motivated in my own budget. You know, you'll hear callers call into that one and pitch their crazy scenarios, and you know, Dave and his team will answer with usually trying to encourage the person to get out of debt and start saving, which is typically the right answer for most scenarios. And I think, well, that's those are the disciplines I need to cultivate. But even as one who, you know, I'm immersed in ministry and biblical teaching and trying to do the right thing, I still face temptation all the time to financially do the wrong thing. Like that's that's all the all over the place, right? Every commercial is asking you to buy something. It might be that we need to increase that literacy and then avail ourselves of some of those resources. Finance is an extension of our character. So if if that's an area that you haven't grown in lately, start growing in that area, become more wise, and maybe you'll find a path forward toward a little bit more freedom or prosperity for your own future.

SPEAKER_00 36:25

You know, it is interesting to just note that the Bible actually says as much or more about money than any other topic. I have heard of churches, particularly ones that are wanting to really reach out and see new followers of Jesus become disciples, who say we gotta like take the conversation, and oftentimes the money conversation is an awkward one in our culture. We don't we don't openly ask people what they make or how much they're in debt. But when you're actually trying to and intend to be a person of character, principle, follow Jesus, getting some of these core issues that like leak into everything else on the table and actually have knowledge, training, accountability, support, concrete, like kind of invasive community, sort of around issues of money seems to be pretty important because it's a foundational issue for everything else. So having that part of your discipleship curriculum, like if you want to be a person of character or you want to follow Jesus, you're gonna have to learn how to manage money well.

SPEAKER_01 37:28

Absolutely. So, Adele, if you were wagering, which I don't think I would encourage people generally to wager to begin with, but if you were going to wager on this whole thing and say fifty years from now, has America worked it out and somehow the debt is either paid off or under control, and we're off to a fun future of new technologies and new prosperity, or are we somehow under the gray skies of perennial debt and struggle?

SPEAKER_00 38:00

I'm actually optimistic. I think excess and sort of the emptiness that all this is producing, you know, money can't buy you happiness, and that's evidently true because we've spent more of it. We've spent 40 trillion. So I do think that there's an entire generation of people that are kind of seeing behind the curtain, so to speak, and they understand that the thing that they're pro that's probably driving all of this at the core, anyways, which is like what actually makes you satisfied, what actually gives you a good life, can't be bought simply with money. That plus the pressures of you know, the um looming inability to keep financing our way to the next solution is gonna force people, I think, to come back to the middle and to begin to have you know more substantive conversations. And one of the things that I think is so exciting about listening to the Dave Ramsey show about people getting out of debt personally is some of these people start monumentally in debt. Like you would just, if you were wagering on their future, you would say, There's no way this person's ever gonna get out of debt. And yet when they start to take small steps with accountability and with knowledge and begin to work in unison with purpose and with a vision for what they really want their future life to be, they start to stack small decisions up in a way that they start to eventually become bigger decisions and bigger decisions, and you see momentum start to be built, and then there's vision and encouragement. You end up, you know, sometimes five and ten and fifteen years later, with these big celebrations where people are paying off their last debt note.

SPEAKER_01 39:42

Debt free scream. Right? That's your scream. Imagine an America-wide debt-free scream, our whole country totally free, free at last. And what could we do in that future? Well, this has been Abundance, sponsored by Barrian.life, originating from Barryan Center Bible Church in Southwest Michigan. Special production thanks to Ben Sanders, Trevor Jones, and the whole BCBC team. Scripture quotations are from the New Living Translation. Help share abundance. Subscribe wherever you listen and pass this episode on to one person who needs it. Share what you're carrying at share atabundant.show. Until next time, live abundantly.