KXEL Presents: The Jacobsen Group Podcast – March 7, 2026

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Good morning on the Jacobson Group here on KXEL, 1540, 100.5 FM.

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We're gonna have a wonderful show today.

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Economics is the study of human choice in the world we live.

Faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.

By investigating faith in economics we can learn how they lead to human flourishing.

This is the Faith in Economics podcast, a presentation of the Gorton Institute at Ottawa University.

Hi, welcome to our show.

I'm Justin Clark, I'm an Art Family Professor of Philosophy and Ethics, and I'm joined by Peter Jacobson, the Guartney Professor of Economic Education Research, and Russ McCullough, the Wayne Angel Chair of Economics and founder of the Guartney Institute.

All right, so here we go again, getting down a philosophical path.

Not sure where this is going to take us, so I'm going to quickly dump it over to Peter to talk about Hume's guillotine.

Yeah, so Hume's guillotine, concepts.

formalized or put forward, just probably not the first person to say anything about it, by David Hume.

And Hume's guillotine is also known as the is-ought problem or the is-ought gap.

And the main idea here is that you cannot, at least according to Hume, derive or bring out an ought from an is.

In other words, just because something is away doesn't mean that things ought to be a certain way.

And so one of the implications from this

is that you cannot go straight from knowledge about the world to some sort of claim about morality or norms.

In other words, just because, you know, this is kind of a silly one, but just because lions don't eat their young doesn't then imply that we should not eat our young or something like that.

That's probably actually not the best example here.

But the idea here is ultimately that something like the scientific method or

you know, rationalistic reasoning.

From those things observing the world, you can't derive morality.

In other words, we couldn't scientifically test morality.

You know, looking, for example, in economics, seeing that the minimum wage causes unemployment, according to him, would not imply that we shouldn't have a minimum wage or that we should.

Rather, that's a separate question from what the actual effects are.

Just because it causes unemployment doesn't mean it's morally wrong.

for the minimum ways to exist on Hume's reckoning.

So Justin, you can refine that because I know you could explain it better than me.

Yeah.

So I think you were correct in broad strokes about what Hume's is-ought dichotomy claims and what it means.

And you rightly pointed out that Hume says that reason is the tool which tells us and helps us evaluate which of our claims are true and which of our claims are false.

And he notes that a lot of these claims that we have about truth and falsity, they bear logical relations to each other.

So from the fact that we think that Socrates is a man and all men are mortal, it follows that Socrates is mortal, right?

Sure.

And what he was really after here is about our claims of judgment.

So in contrast to what we're going to call claims of facts,

Claims of judgment are claims about things being better or worse than other things.

And ethical claims fall into this category for Hume.

These are claims about what ought to be the case

and

what ought to be the case and what ought not to be the case.

Those are value judgments.

Any kind of value judgment for Hume is actually going to be immune from rational decision.

in the sense that knowing the way things are and being able to use reason to its greatest possible capability will not tell us the way things should be.

This holds for ethical claims, this holds for aesthetic claims like claims of beauty.

These are all going to kind of come back to questions of taste for human.

And in Hume's later philosophy, I think he kind of cheats a little bit because he wants aesthetic and judgments of taste to be slightly more objective than purely subjective.

But this is oct dichotomy.

And the claim that you cannot derive an oct from an is was really, really influential in the sense that it provides the background for all

the philosophical and intellectual background for all our claims, like beauty is in the eye of the beholder and known, disputatum, well, uh, there's no, uh, no, no disputing, uh, matters of taste.

And so what I don't think a lot of people realize is that this actually for Hume depends on his theory of mind and his theory of action.

So Hume's theory of action starts out by saying, well, let's have, let's look at what's in our minds.

And he has this model of the mind, which is usually called the Bel-des model of the mind, which is beliefs and desires.

And our minds are composed of beliefs and desires.

Russ was just talking about what a burger in here, because Russ likes what a burger.

It's not my favorite.

And I desire it.

And he desires it.

So Russ was also just telling us how there's a Whataburger in Gardener, knowing that the Whataburger's in Gardener,

which is about 20

minutes north of here, closest one to Ottawa.

Yes.

That information often makes Russ go get Whataburgers right at the Whataburger.

I know that Whataburger's in Gardener, but his belly says he not ought to go.

Too lit, too hot.

Is that the dichotomy?

We're going to cut roasts

with my knife.

So the knowledge that Waterburgers and Gardner equipped with that knowledge...

Russ often goes to Gardner to get a water burger.

I know water burgers in Gardner, too.

Now, man, it doesn't motivate me to go there, right?

Why?

Because I don't really like water burger.

I know it's not my favorite burger in the way that it's Russ's favorite burger.

If there was an In-N-Out in Gardner, I would go to that In-N-Out all the time because I like In-N-Out.

So for Hume, we can really clearly separate beliefs and desires.

Russ and I share the same belief that Whataburger isn't Gardener.

However, we have different desires.

Russ desires Whataburger, I don't desire Whataburger.

So it is only when you have a belief coupled with the right kind of desire that it gets anybody to act.

Actions are products of beliefs with desires.

And actually this is

this kind of model of the mind goes from Hume.

You can find it in Kant when Kant talks about maxims.

And then you can even find this same model of the mind in like Lububanmesis who accepts like a Kantian mental framework.

So this model of how our minds are structured was really influential.

And Hume says, what's really interesting though, is that if we look at our beliefs and our desires,

Our beliefs can be true or false.

It could be the case that Russ goes, they're building, you know, there's a water burger in Gardner and we get there, and it turns out there's no water burger there, right?

The belief was false.

Beliefs can be true or false, but for Hume, desires don't correspond to truth or falsity.

If you've ever had the argument with somebody, you're like, try this soup.

The soup's so good.

Try the soup.

And you go like, I don't like soup or, you know, rancher blue cheese, right?

I don't like blue cheese.

I've tried to like blue cheese.

I've given it a go a number of times.

I don't like it.

It's just something I don't like.

I can't con myself into liking it.

I can't reason myself into liking it.

It just seems to be a basic fact about my constitution that I don't like blue cheese.

When I say something like, I don't like blue cheese,

That kind of sounds like it's making a true or false statement, but what I'm really doing for Hume when I say I don't like blue cheese is something like saying boo blue cheese, right?

And when Russ is saying he likes Whataburger or when Russ says Whataburger is good or Whataburger is delicious, what Russ is really saying is yay Whataburger.

So when I say

Blue cheese is nasty.

I'm saying boo, blue cheese.

And when Russ says what a burger is delicious, he's saying yay, what a burger.

Now, interestingly, yay, what a burger is neither true nor false, right?

Yay, what a burger is that, you know, if somebody says go Broncos, that's not true or false.

They're just expressing.

their evaluations or their desires.

Another way that this is sometimes put is in the language of the 20th century philosopher language, John Searle, who says, our beliefs have word-to-world direction of fit.

That is, we want our words to match the way the world is.

We want our beliefs.

We evaluate them by whether or not they correspond to the way things actually are in the world, in the universe, et cetera.

On the other hand, desires have the opposite direction of fit.

A desire, when we express a desire, we're saying, I would like the world to match the way this desire is.

I like what a burger means.

I wish there were more what a burgers around.

It would be great if my child won the spelling bee means I would like the world to be the case such that my child wins the spelling bee.

One thing that

we can note is that if we set things up this way then very clearly it's only our beliefs and desires that are true or false and not our sorry it's only our beliefs that are true or false our desires are not true or false they're just brute facts about our constitutions and we can also see for Hume that any amount of beliefs

by themselves, put them together any way you like.

Truth or falsity of our beliefs can tell us what other beliefs have to be true if some of our beliefs are true, but they will not by themselves get us to act.

They don't motivate us.

They can't motivate us without a corresponding desire.

And Hume says something like, let's look at any of the virtues or the vices that we consider virtuous or vicious.

Take willful murder, for examples, is his claim.

He goes, let's look at the murder scene.

We is it a bloody murder scene we can check you could say this is a really bloody murder scene and i go like no that's false there's no blood there right but if you go it was a really evil murder scene because where's the evil in the murder if you look everywhere you want you know i look for the evil but i couldn't find it was it under the body maybe the blood was covering it up because that doesn't.

You're never going to find the evil, Hume says, until you turn your gaze back into your own breast and realize that what you mean by that was a really evil murder scene was something like, it really disturbed me.

It made me really upset.

All our evaluative terms for Hume are that way.

They aren't reflections of the way things are out there.

They are reflections of our reaction to the world.

And since this is the case,

there is no bridge from our belief column in our category of mental items to our desire column.

There is no function that tells us, given these beliefs, we ought to have these kinds of desires.

When you put them together, they make people do things, but there is no logical relation between the two of them.

And in fact, if we take him very seriously,

This actually means that a bunch of moral reasoning that we usually like to do isn't even correct reasoning.

So things like, this is a murder, murder is wrong, therefore this is wrong.

And Hume's actual retelling, though this is murder is a factual claim, was it a murder?

Sure.

Murder is wrong is not the kind of belief, murder is wrong is like what a murder is good.

Murder is wrong means something like,

Boo murder, right?

And since boo murder is neither true or false, and since the way we evaluate arguments is by saying, if the premises are both true, does the conclusion follow necessarily?

We actually can't do any kind of the kind of moral reasoning that we would like to do.

So this is just a long way of spelling out why Hume thinks he is forced to this conclusion.

Hume says morality

For everything I've said about it not being true or false, for humans very clear that morality actually is one of the strongest motivators in human beings.

That something is right or that something is wrong will often get us to do things or not do them.

And for human beliefs by themselves are a priori and fundamentally impotent when it comes to motivation.

That something is the case cannot tell us and will not inspire us to do anything because

It doesn't tell us whether or not it should be the case.

We only beliefs and desires can do that.

So that makes sense why economists are so boring because we just dwell too much in the belief part and proving wrong or right, which is kind of boring.

The more life of life, the more fun stuff might come from evaluating the odds and expressing desires.

Maybe that's not the reason economists are boring, but it might be a

reason.

All right.

Well, this looks like a good spot for break.

When we come back, I didn't quite get the guillotine part, so I want some clarification on that.

And also, what was the prevailing line of thinking prior to Hume that this was kind of groundbreaking?

So we'll be back in just a bit.

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OK, so we're back.

And I assume the guillotine thing you can touch on pretty quick and must be cutting or slicing through these two things.

Maybe that's my speculation.

And then, you know, what did he contribute?

Like, did people think differently prior to him bringing this up?

You're

100% correct.

That is what the guillotine is, right?

A guillotine separates your head from your body and does it cleanly and it does it in a way that makes it very hard to reattach the two.

And so Hume's guillotine here is supposed to be this idea that Hume's analysis has divorced values from reason and done it for good and in a way such that it's impossible to reattach the two.

And so, you know, you can see like the seeds of any kind of like cultural relativism in here.

etc.

And then what came before?

Well, you're most likely to encounter Hume in a class called modern philosophy.

And by modern philosophy, we just mean stuff from Descartes after.

So, I mean, pretty old still, right?

Prior to Descartes, you had a bunch of different traditions in philosophy, but the primary one was the kind of

like Aquinas style philosophy that you get, which is a molding of Plato and Aristotle and primarily Aristotle and appropriation of Aristotle from through the lens of Aquinas.

And according to Aristotle, the way things are is a very good guide about the way things ought to be.

And we can derive is from art.

And in fact, these things go hand in hand together.

And for Aristotle,

things, not just humans, but almost everything has a talos, a thing it is aiming at.

The universe itself has something it is aiming at.

So it's not just that there are objectively good or bad aims.

These are aims that reason itself can discover.

And Hume narrows the scope of reason to just concern the truth and falsity of sentences.

Then

He very specifically says, and by the way, what we mean by truth or falsity of sentences can only be a correspondence theory of truth, which is that our sentences correspond to the way things are, and we can find nothing in the world for our value claims to correspond to.

Therefore, we must have this big divorce.

Hmm, okay.

And Hume was a colleague and friend of Adam Smith's, correct?

So I'm just trying to think of the timeline here.

1776 Waffa Nations, is that somewhere in the ballpark of this?

Yeah, Hume wrote before this, Hume wrote The Treatise on Human Nature, which was his longest and arguably best book from which this comes.

I think he was 27 when he wrote it, and he complained.

Complaint that it fell stillborn from the presses like nobody bought it and he actually couldn't get a job afterwards It was only because Adam Smith was his buddy.

You've got him at job at the University of Edinburgh

as a

librarian They were best friends.

This is by the way the picture of mind and ethics that you get in Adam Smith as well Adam Smith took Hume's theory of mind theory of virtue and theory of action and kind of made it slightly more palatable because Hume was writing more as a firebrand

and that was in the theory of moral sentiments in the late 1750s that that

Smith wrote after... Yeah, Smith

wrote after Hume.

He's adopting the Humean framework, and he gets the idea of moral sentiments.

Specifically, I mean, this is like, this is Humeanism, for sure.

Yeah.

Did I answer?

Yep.

Yep.

So I

was wondering if you'd kind of set up some...

So I think where Hume's guillotine is impactful in economics is twofold.

A, as Justin kind of mentioned, this idea of taste not being a matter of dispute is actually also something that

economists have spoken of kind of to mean something different which is just that we don't have any way to account for taste and so we should assume us like a stable pattern of preferences or something.

I don't know that this actually directly applies that the taste not being dispute doesn't mean they couldn't be accounted for changed and so I'm not sure that it's worth opening that box but the other place that it's been brought into economics and other sciences in general

is in what's called the positive normative distinction.

And so the positive normative distinction generally says, well, there's positive things.

That is truth about how things are.

And then there's the normative, which deals with how things ought to be.

So we've got our is and our ought.

And a lot of times in economics, we're taught that economics is a positive science, which means it deals with questions of is and not really questions of ought.

And so I kind of have two minds.

In general, I'm not a supporter of humus guillotine.

I think the older philosophers, I think Aristotle had a better understanding of the relationship between facts and values than we see in Hume.

But I almost like a modified version of Hume's guillotine, which is that from a particular is statement, we can't necessarily derive a particular odd statements.

So it's a very modified version.

But what I mean by that is the mistake that a lot of people still make, even post-Hume,

is thinking just because something has a bad consequence, in fact, therefore it means that we should, in practice, think that it's wrong.

And so here's what I mean.

It was actually the minimum wage example is an example of this.

Does the fact that the minimum wage caused unemployment mean that we shouldn't have a minimum wage?

Well, no.

I don't think we should have a minimum wage, by the way, but that's not the only reason why I think that.

Because it may be the case that the people who have a higher wage because of the minimum wage, maybe their gains,

outweigh the losses of the people who lose the job or something like that, right?

We can't compare interpersonal utility or something like that.

And so just because there is another example of this, I was actually talking to my daughter about this the other day.

She was talking about pollution being bad.

And she was talking about people shouldn't put smoke in the air and stuff like that.

And I said, well,

Be careful with that, because if you don't put smoke in the air, then nobody has electricity.

Nobody probably has houses either.

And you like your house, right,

sweetie?

And so this isn't Hume's guillotine at this point, right?

To be totally transparent.

It's not the same as me saying you cannot possibly derive an ought from it is.

And I don't think that's true.

I actually think you can possibly derive aughts from izzes.

But I do think there's something valuable about the idea that just because something is,

doesn't mean you can construe a particular art out of it in an easy way.

I don't know Justin, did any of that make sense?

I think so.

I too am not a human and I too think that a lot of my problem is that I think most economists stopped reading philosophy or the economics profession as a whole stopped reading philosophy after the birth of logical positivism and then which

Most philosophers don't barely any logical positive philosophers anymore logical positivism was the idea that philosophy should just be concerned with so-called positive statements nor that normative philosophy was impossible and so is metaphysical philosophy and this followed directly from Hume's Humes one of his last the last line in the treatise of human nature is do

Does this book contain any metaphysical speculations?

If so, then commit it to the flames for it can contain nothing but error.

And the logical positivists took this seriously.

And then I think that a lot of disciplines adopted this methodology, and this was popular in the pre-World War II era.

And I think economists

Did this to an extent you will often find economists saying like economics is value-free and the people in this room know that that's one of my big bugaboos is saying like I don't I don't think it is I don't think it can be I think the most you could say is something like in economics We treat people's value claims as correct most of the time just because that's it's beyond the scope of economics to Evaluate each individual value claim

getting you think the analysis can be value-free

No.

Okay.

I think that even like if you look at like Samuelson's criteria for what can even be interpreted as a set of preferences, right?

They have to be stable over time.

They have to be to even interpret somebody's preferences as a list of preferences.

They have to be non-circular.

I think there is no interpreting anybody else without imposing the norms of rationality on their utterances.

Without which I don't think we can understand what the the noises they are making as utterances.

I think we can be as value free as possible, which is what I think the discipline aims to do.

And I think it's admirable.

But is that

imposing rationality?

Is that a statement imposing a value or is that a matter of facts?

I think rationality is a norm.

OK.

I also don't draw this fact value distinction,

the way

that Hume does.

I think that it is, I think with Aristotle, that a bunch of our value judgments just are true, and they are true in the exact same way that our so-called factual claims are true.

I don't accept the correspondence of truth, correspondence theory of truth, unless by correspondence we just mean something vaguely like corresponds to the way things are, which isn't a problem for value claims, because we can just say like, yes.

Can you give an example of that?

of what you just said like that you you disagree with them and and that you think

there is something with that.

So remember, Hume says,

Hume narrows the scope of truth or falsity to mean correspondence to a fact, where if we want to know if something's true, we have to look out in the world and see if there's a fact there that would correspond to it.

I wrote a dissertation saying that this is actually impossible even for the kind of claims that Hume thinks can be validated factually.

That if we're actually logically serious, this results in there either being one fact to which all true sentences correspond,

or there ends up being a unique fact for every unique sentence that's every unique true sentence and this is a problem too because then it seems like we're not checking to see whether there's a fact to figure out if something's true or figure out if something's true and then saying therefore there must be a fact as well and that makes facts the kind of shadows of true propositions rather than facts, truth being a result of its correspondence and that's kind of inside baseball but

The claim here is just the theory that Hume is working on to say works for empirical claims, but doesn't work for value claims.

I'm saying it doesn't even work for empirical claims.

Therefore, the fact that it doesn't work for value claims either isn't a problem.

Because, as Art me pointed out, everybody's problem is no one's problem in particular, right?

It's impossible to identify the fact to which any empirical, to individuate the fact to which any empirical statement would correspond.

Alright, well that looks like a pretty good spot to wrap, unless you've got other final words to bring us home.

This has been a production of the Gorton Institute here at Ottawa University.

I'd like to thank you all for listening.

Five Star Reading helps other people find us, otherwise, pass this along to friends and family that might like to take a listen.

Other than that, be fruitful and multiply.

Thanks.

you

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Well, springtime in Iowa, KXEL 1540, America's original Clear Channel 50,000 watt.

Beacon along with that great FM transmitter out of Cedar Rapids the Jacobson group on Saturday mornings We've seen a lot of weather go through here hot cold dry and wet We are in springtime in ios a beautiful Saturday morning either way you cut it the sun's good and the rain is good

for all of our ag folks.

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Hello Clint, how are you?

Hey, I'm doing wonderful.

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Right, so I mean it's, I guess how we do our part is when we resell a home we fully recondition it before the new homeowner takes possession of it.

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Absolutely.

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Here we are with a great Clint Haymes.

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Yeah, we really do have something for everyone.

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How can they find you, Kurt?

How about legacy phone number, social media site, and the drive-by in the visit?

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Welcome to our show today.

My name is Peter Jacobson.

I'm the Courtney Professor of Economic Education and Research.

Joining us today, we have Dr. Russ McCullough.

the Wayne Angel chair of economics and founder of the Gorton Institute here at Allaway University.

We also have Dr. Justin Clark, the minority family professor of philosophy and ethics.

Okay, well, it's tax time and even by the time this airs, you know, we're still in the midst of it.

You should have gotten some forms from your employers by now and maybe you're starting to make appointments with your tax people.

My guy, Bregujan Lee, we don't ever set up until like April 13th.

We start like, oh, maybe we should set up an appointment with Jason.

And then sometimes he can do it.

But if we haven't paid enough, then we have to do an extension.

So it's usually not a fun time of year.

People spending hours doing tax returns.

Part of the reason that, you know, I used to advocate against a national sales tax or for a national sales tax.

And that would get rid of the income tax.

And I think the world would be a better place for that.

And part of it was all the hours and dedication and dollars that go into income tax preparation.

Whereas if you just paid it at the cash register,

Wouldn't life be a little simpler?

So that was called the fair tax, which is pretty much all but dead, I think, at this point.

So somehow that's a long segue of Peter about to get into a topic on income tax preparation and some issues related to it.

So I just thought I'd tee it up with, why do we have to go through this?

But we all do.

Peter, what do you got?

Yeah.

So income taxes and specifically the salt deduction were on my mind recently because we have a lot of rumblings out of New York.

by current mayor of New York City, Mom Dami, who has been kind of rattling the cage to get the able to increase income taxes of his own volition.

But he's putting pressure on the governor of New York to do that.

And that the leverage that he's using is he's saying, well, if we don't get higher income taxes, then we're going to have to increase property taxes in New York City.

New York City already has outrageous property taxes.

This would disproportionately hurt middle-class people.

And so this is kind of a pressure point that Mamdami is using in order to convince the state governments to allow for higher income taxes, which apparently in New York he needs the state government sign off.

He can't have his own income tax at the city level.

And so the the reason why I think this is valuable to talk about is that mom Dami would want state income taxes to be such that the average person in New York City or the average rich person rather New York City is paying like double what they're paying in the next highest state, which I think is New Jersey.

And the difficulty here is that, you know, New York City is running a ridiculously high budget in terms of expenditure.

They're outpacing several states at this point, including states with higher populations.

So like if you.

take the whole population of the state and compare it to New York City.

New York City is spending more money, but it has a lower population than I think it's like Florida, for example.

And so, you know, how can people get away with this?

Well, I think part of it has to do with the salt deduction, which is kind of the point of the podcast today.

The salt deduction is I think the only income tax reduction that I am opposed to.

Maybe you could construe hypothetical income tax reductions that I would also be opposed to, but I'm a big fan of anything that reduces people's taxes.

Obviously, I'm biased.

I like the child, uh, tax care or child care.

Whatever.

Credit.

I like the taxes on tip thing that Trump did with eliminating taxes on tips.

I'm generally in favor of writing off all forms of interest, mortgage interest.

So I like tax cuts.

I'm a big fan.

I mostly think the more people can get out of taxes, the better.

But I don't like salt.

And the reason why is pretty straightforward.

And I'm not the first person to point this out.

A lot of conservatives have sort of raised the alarm over the effect of the salt deduction.

So just to be clear listeners, the salt deduction is the state and local tax deduction.

And so how it works is on your federal income taxes, if you itemize your deductions, you can write off the amounts of tax you pay to your state and local governments.

So that's the salt deduction.

And you know, this sounds good until you think about the fact that the effect of this deduction is that it lessens the negative impact of increasing taxes at the state level for left-wing states.

And so places like California, places like New York, they're able to sort of artificially increase their taxes.

And in a way, the federal government subsidizes that by collecting less

from those states where the tax rates are really low.

So it's kind of like what's happening is California and New York are taking money out of the federal income tax pool and putting it to their own free town cars or whatever.

Groceries.

For

everything in the state.

Yeah, Mondami's free grocery store, whatever.

Unfortunately, Trump recently has been on the wrong side of this.

And so, in his first term, 2016 to 2020, he actually helps usher in a death blow for salt.

He essentially didn't let it renew, or at least didn't allow it to continue at the pace it was.

And I was a big fan of this when he did it.

But now with, I think it's the Tax Cut and Jobs Act, you know, set the initial cap, with the big beautiful bill, recently increased the cap so you can deduct up to $40,000 of state and local taxes from your federal taxes from 2025 to 2029.

Again, for those who itemize and obviously in order to take advantage of this, you'd have to be very wealthy probably.

Yeah, I was gonna bring that up just, I think it's...

Less than 10% or less than 20%.

Once Trump, Trump 1.0 raised the deductions and supplied the tax code, I think it's very little people, very few people of taxpayers anyway that actually pay, that do itemize.

Yeah, that's, I mean, I know I could Google it, I haven't, but it's not a large, Justin maybe can Google it while we're

talking.

Very few taxpayers end up actually paying the majority of the taxes anyway.

That's correct.

That's correct.

Also.

Yeah, it's only 50% the upper 50%.

But yeah, so it's very few people with the high standard deduction that wiped out a lot of.

kind of tax headache, actually, because you don't have to worry about itemizing.

Yeah, if you trust the Google AI, what I'm seeing is that 45% of taxpayers with average gross income over $200,000 to use it.

And so that's kind of the threshold where people start to use it.

And then it's about half and half compared to only 3% for those earning from the $20,000 to $50,000 range.

And so it's kind of exactly what you'd expect is that it tends to benefit the rich.

Right.

Your point is only further shown there that you are actually truly targeting the rich.

Exactly.

So it tends to only benefit the rich, which I'm not opposed to the rich having tax cuts.

I prefer to give tax cuts the middle class into the poor, but I'm not opposed to the rich having tax cuts.

But what I dislike...

is that the tax cut that's being provided by SALT to the rich is actually moving into the pocket of the states of California and New York.

And these leftist states that have taxes that would otherwise be unbearable to the citizens.

And so what this does is it creates this weird environment where New York City, because they get these huge deductions, can do all these things that they wouldn't otherwise be able to do.

And they could be like, look at what we're doing.

Our tax rate is so high.

And we're still doing great.

People are still living.

here, look at all the services we're providing, when really your effective tax rate isn't that much higher because you're just stealing from the federal government to make up for that.

It's not really stealing because for some reason the federal government with a red house and senate and presidency have voted themselves into subsidizing California, New York, again these huge tax states, New Jersey, and there as well.

So I see this as an all around lose.

I can't think of any good reason why it should continue.

One thing, you know, this is the Faith in Economics podcast.

If you read the Psalms, it's usually talking about the wicked and punishments.

But one of the things that the book of Psalms has with respect to consequences is that oftentimes the Psalmist want like the curse that he puts on his enemies is that they just fall into their own nets.

Like that's a very common curse is that I hope that the traps and the schemes they devise come upon their own heads, which is honestly a great hope for like a wicked person.

Like you don't have to hope excess evil comes onto them.

Only that

like the machine they set up to ruin you falls on them.

That would be like the ultimate justice.

This is the exact opposite of that.

This is like allowing somebody to create this really heavy architecture that sort of aims

at benefiting themselves and with that architecture, you're then subsidizing them to say, well, look, Texas are a bunch of fools because their tax rates are low and no one's moving there from California because they're willing to pay the higher taxes.

Texas should raise taxes too if they want to act smart like we are.

It's just not allowing justice, like the natural justice that would occur if you didn't have this policy to occur.

So

a couple of technicalities that you might not even know.

Can New York

have an income tax that's unique to Manhattan.

I don't think they can.

I don't think so either, but I'm not 100% sure.

I actually imagine the state could choose income tax the way they want it to.

So by Mamdani assuming that it has to affect everybody statewide, then again, there's kind of this distribution among funds shifting one direction or another, even within New York.

if they're not able to target.

And I

might point out that that's one of the beauties of the property tax.

So he's like complaining that he doesn't want to increase the property tax, but then you're actually directly taxing the people that you're trying to use the funds for, right?

Because presumably, well, maybe we didn't cover that.

But I'm not trying to do this to like, that'll help keep people in Manhattan.

He's only targeting the ultra wealthy.

And so he says like, oh,

We've got this unfair system where all the ultra wealthy are living in New York City and I can't control the tax rates to make them pay their fair share.

And so the state needs to increase the tax rates only on the ultra wealthy, not on everybody.

So that

way the state can collect more money, distribute it to the municipalities as they do with, you know, proportionality.

And if you don't do that, and the threat is if you don't do that, I will raise taxes on everybody through increased property

tax.

And I guess the problem is if you increase the property tax, which I was saying would be good,

you might be hitting the renters, or you will be hitting, I shouldn't say might, you will be hitting the renters, which then might be some of the class of income that he's not trying to hit.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So he's trying to figure out a way to carve out something.

Can't they just go to door to door and just extract it?

Like wouldn't Mum Donny want to do that?

Like just take their property?

Like maybe a wealth tax or something?

Go ahead.

Why would he have to?

Why would he have to?

Why aren't people volunteering to do this since it's obviously the right thing to do?

All these people are, I listen to billionaires say, I'm a billionaire and I want to pay my fair share.

You won't believe the opportunity I have for you.

And this is also like, this is because Mom Donnie has this like, what is it?

I don't know the number.

Is it five billion shortfall and is in the New York City budget or something like that?

Yes.

Yeah.

5.4

billion.

Yeah.

running, he accused Adams of lying about there being a $5 billion hole in the budget.

And then he said, you know, we can do this.

We have enough money to do the programs that I want to do.

And then completely unforeseeably, it turned out that there wasn't enough money to pay for all of his projects.

Yeah, it's shocking.

Yeah, on that, what's funny is, yeah, you're exactly right.

He's trying to address the $5 billion gap for his new projects.

The article that I read about this pointed out, there would be no shortfall at all to cover if they just spent what they spent last year, which, you know, granted, like maybe we expect some amount of increase or whatever, but.

not to the tune of 5.4 billion developers, right?

And so ultimately, mom Dami is asking for a bailout from the governor.

And ultimately, if the governor goes along with this, it's actually going to be Trump who's bailed out mom Dami in the kind of like this weird logic of salt.

And so my, my, I think.

maybe even a little bit.

This could be a populist issue.

I would think a popular comment is, I really think we should get rid of salt.

I think that all around it disadvantages, you know, the middle income as opposed to higher income in relative terms at least.

And in doing so, it actually bails out fiscally irresponsible states at the end of the day because, you know, any state that's increasing taxes, they're doing it because they've done what Mondami has done, which is they've ramped up these projects.

They spent $3 million on building bike racks or something.

They're wasting money, so they need the tax revenue.

And then they just, you know, have that buck past the federal government.

So yeah, it does.

I mean, Trump seems like he has to walk a fine line, too, because it really reeks of cronyism that he is one of the rich guys from New York.

that it, I mean, how can it not look kind of bad that I know, and he was like, oh, I like tax deductions.

Tax deductions are good kind of like how you let off with and because he's been able to take advantage of that state tax deduction for years being a person of Manhattan in New York

with

high income.

And to be fair, I think salt does predate Trump.

I'm pretty sure that.

Oh, yeah.

No, it's been

around for years and years.

Yeah.

But I know what you're saying that ultimately like he benefited a lot from this policy and now he's looking at, you know,

situation New York City and all that.

Justin, you want to give us cliffhanger what you wanted to comment on so we can head to a break?

Yeah, I think that I agree with Peter and I think that some ways the argument that Peter put forward could be misconstrued as, you know, somebody could say, well, look at Peter, who's usually in favor of lowering taxes no matter what.

And he's just playing politics here because he thinks that this tax break helps people he doesn't like.

And I think that's a popular way that opposition to salt can be misconstrued.

But I really want to point out what Peter was saying was that salt, it isn't that it benefit, it just happens to benefit people that Peter doesn't like and he actually didn't even say he didn't like them.

What he said was that it's unfair and that if that this just move these expenditures when they happen, they have to be paid for by people.

And this moves who is paying for these policies out of

the very wealthy tax bracket who are the only people who can afford to or who will benefit from the kind of salt deduction being made.

Is that correct?

Yeah, I think another comment on that when we

come back to it.

Yeah, we'll pick up from there in just a bit.

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Okay, so we're back and Peter, you had some other things to kind of extend off of what Justin had said.

Yeah, so.

Justin, I think, is right in making the point that what I'm not saying with my opposition to salt is that it helps blue states and I don't like blue states.

Therefore, we should tax them more or something like that.

That's not what I'm saying.

What I'm saying instead is the federal government's taxes are a response to the spending that the federal government does.

That's just a matter of fact.

We outspend our tax base.

What we have to pay in taxes is now fixed.

It's increasing, but it's fixed in the sense that we have debts that we have to pay, right?

Right.

And so what that means is there's already bills that are due.

And so when you give a deduction for salt to residents in high-tech states, California, New Jersey, New York, what you're doing is you're saying the other states are going to have a larger share in paying back the debt or deficit.

And the reason we're giving them a larger share is so that those states can spend more money themselves on these local and municipal things, which it seems to be a post to fairness.

And it's also opposed to good incentives.

I don't want it to be the case that when

Mom Dami successfully if he does lobbies for New York to increase his income taxes.

I don't want the effect of that income tax increase to be blunted by the federal government.

I want the people who live there to feel it so they know what in reality it's happening.

If you cause an action that causes pain, I prefer the pain go to you.

So that way,

you know about it and you can change in future actions.

I don't like it when people are able to spread the pain to a bunch of other people who they don't have to interact with and maybe people don't even know the source of the pain, right?

That's a recipe for bad incentives and bad outcomes.

Yeah, and basic efficiency in economics is to have

pain and hurt and help go with action, follows action, so a little more direct cause and effect so that they're bearing that and take that into account when they decide who they want to vote in office and what policies they might support her or not support.

So with the deduction, we can't forget that there's people near there that would ultimately share in all of that.

with the higher tax rates.

So wouldn't momdonomy by raising taxes be the black eye?

Or is he thinking there'd be so much more benefits from social programs that come about from it that it would end up supporting his cause?

Yeah, well, two things.

I do think some of that pain that would be felt would fall on him.

But again, it's blunted by salt.

That's the problem.

If he's inflicting, you know,

$10,000 of pain, salt is absorbing, $8,000.

I'm just making up numbers here.

It would depend on the situation, obviously.

And so, yeah, I mean, there's something like, so to some extent, he'll be to blame.

But one of the great things about socialist mayors in America, because they come along pretty frequently, actually, you know, mostly infrequently, but you see it every once in a while is you occasionally get to see the experiment fail again and again.

And so Mamdami's doing the grocery store thing.

Kansas City had a city grocery store that

just

went under like last year.

Chicago has like played with that and it's failed.

Like this happens a lot of different times, a lot of different places.

And Margaret Thatcher I think had that quip about the problem with socialism as you run out of other people's money or whatever.

Depending on how the socialism is set up, it takes a longer or shorter amount of time to run out of other people's money.

I don't want it to be the case that when New York runs out of other people's money, then they can start taking the money out of Nebraska or Texas or Wyoming or states that don't do these weird tax policies.

Which is effectively what the Sultan is saying as you're pointing out.

Yeah, exactly.

Definitely on the issue of fairness does not hit well.

And I think that brings us into the idea of federalism and one of the benefits of the United States.

I tend to be more of a state's rights person than our current equilibrium.

I would prefer that the federal government have less authority and the state governments have more authority.

But at least relative to other countries, the United States does a very good job of dividing power between federal and state governments.

A lot of places, the province you're in or whatever, barely matters at all.

But the United States, the state that you're in actually has a pretty significant impact.

And this is another one of those cases where I dislike

Salt because what it does is it kind of standardizes taxes across the country in a certain way.

It evens and spreads out tax rates.

If you believe in the United States as like a laboratory of democracies, which is where you have all these 50 states and you've got all these different, you know, experiments going on about which policies are good and which policies are bad.

My view is we should really want very minimal federal involvement, very minimal federal taxes, because then we could look at two states.

We could look at Texas with its tax rates and California with its tax rates.

Maybe you find a state that has high property, but low income.

One state that has high income, low property.

One state that has a big sales tax, like Russ suggests.

You know, you've got all these different plans and you could see which states do the best.

You could watch people move to the states that are doing well as we kind of saw during COVID.

But salt is just a way to blunch.

the impact of those experiments.

It's a way to smooth the mistakes across everybody.

And the problem is that ruins the knowledge generated by the process.

And again, it also just incentivizes continuation of bad experiments.

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back.

This is the Faith in Economics podcast, a presentation of the Gortney Institute at Ottawa University.

Welcome to our show today.

My name is Peter Jacobson.

I'm the Gortney Professor of Economic Education and Research.

Joining us today, we have Dr. Justin Clark, the Menard Family Professor of Philosophy and Ethics.

Also Dr. Russ McCullough, the Wayne Angel Chair of Economics and the founder of the Gortney Institute.

All right, it's time to put a little faith into our Faith in Economics podcast.

Justin's got something that seems like a big topic, so I'm really excited to get into it and I'll just let you introduce it.

Go ahead, Justin.

So I've been thinking for a while about the Bible and also DNA and how I think a really good way to think about the Bible is that it is the DNA for Western civilization.

And to explain kind of what I mean by that, I want to take a

a quick detour into like what exactly DNA is and how DNA works in a human.

There's a great book, they won the Pulitzer Prize, it's called Girdle, Escher Bach and in this one chapter the author Hofstetter talks about the way DNA works and DNA, remember it's those G-A-T-C pairs of

amino acids, right, and every individual has a unique DNA, it's finite, but what happens is when a sperm and an egg meet, right, a new DNA is generated, and for every single stage of the development of the individual, the part of the individual that's developing takes its instructions from that DNA.

So DNA tells an 8-celled organism how to expand into a 16-celled organism.

DNA tells your fingernails how to grow into fingernails.

DNA instructs your eyeballs how to make an eyeball.

And it's a bit like if you thought about a phonograph playing a record.

DNA is its own

self-playing record.

And it's a record that keeps replaying itself.

And every time it replays itself, it gives itself a new set of instructions, which it can follow correctly or incorrectly.

And if it follows, then it repeats that same set of instructions in the sense that it'll be the same amino acids, GATC, the same amino acids in the same order, will tell a fingernail how to be

how to grow as a fingernail, and will also tell an eyeball when to stop growing as an eyeball.

So it's the exact same amino acids in the same order, and it directs, controls, and tells the organism how to grow.

And so that's just a strictly scientific view of the way DNA operates in human growth, right?

You can go wrong with DNA, right?

If your telomeres get messed up or if your cells start making copies of themselves in ways that DNA doesn't recommend, they can go really wrong with your body, right?

And if your DNA gets messed up, that's one of the things that can happen.

Great.

Okay.

So that's the DNA part of this.

And then

Over the past like 10 years or whatever having read a bunch of books like Thomas Woods how the church built Western civilization You can kind of see how And I think this is becoming much more Much more popular to talk about in the past eight years or so is the way in which Christianity has served as a cultural strata that the West has grown out of right and

Not only has the West grown out of Christianity, but the rest, the West took off arguably because of Christianity.

And it brought Christianity to places where Christianity didn't exist.

Like, you can look at the history of missionaries in New Guinea, for example, where they start proclaiming the word of Jesus Christ and get people who were previously canals to stop their practice.

And so on, and then I had also read a long article a while ago, I think it was by, might have been by Justin Murphy, who said that religion is a technology for the transmission of culture, which seems anthropologically to me.

to be correct.

That is one of the things that religion does really well, is transmit culture.

And we've also seen a bunch of, and this is what somebody like Nietzsche said, and what somebody like Kierkegaard said too, is that to the extent that the West is headed down a road of abandoning Christianity, people in the West better be careful because they don't realize the degree to which all of our moral systems

our virtues, our vices, these all follow from Christianity and are based in Christianity and we don't realize how many of them are going to topple to the extent that we abandoned Christianity.

Now, the viewpoint of the Bible as DNA of Western civilization might go something like, in the same way that DNA, when an organism is following the instructions of its DNA, at every different stage of that organism,

The same, it's one of the things that's crazy about DNA is that it's the same set of instructions, but that when different organisms read those instructions, that different organism gets told to do a different thing, but it's always the right thing for that organism.

Does that make sense?

Always the right thing.

If it's not uncor- I was just thinking when it's when DNA is bad or what, you know, with DNA slicing, but

yeah, so you can read it wrongly.

Okay.

But the thing about DNA is there's no DNA reading that's, oh, it means the DNA reading always means keep growing because you're a fingernail, because that's not what it means for eyeballs.

Does that make sense?

Okay.

Yeah, sure.

And it would seem to me to be at least pretty good evidence that a text is supernatural or divine if no matter what society is interpreting it,

seems to always guide them in the right direction.

Sure.

Okay,

yeah.

In the same way that we recognize that DNA does provide a roadmap for the telos of an individual's physical growth.

And there are ways to screw that up.

But there isn't, yeah, I guess I'll stop there.

Yeah, I think it's a good metaphor, perhaps the right way to think about it.

And to continue on your last point, so

What an alternative reading could be that, like, well, maybe it's something that just dominates and destroys and squeezes out everything else.

And I don't think that's right either, because if, for example, you look at, like, Roman Catholicism as an example, people will tell you that American Roman Catholicism is very different than, like, Italian Roman Catholicism.

That, like, they're very different expressions.

In fact, like, the European Catholics always joke that American Roman Catholics are Protestants for various reasons.

hands knocked into the specifics of that.

The point is that it actually does seem like something like your culture can persist in the vein of Christianity that comes to you without being totally destroyed, but without being completely maintained the way it was before, right?

So the list of instructions is a list of instructions, so people have to do things in response.

If part of your culture is ritualistic cannibalism, that part does disappear because the instructions say that's not part of it, right?

Just like if your cells were like self-immolating because they had maybe a bad list of instructions.

If a good list of instructions came along, they would stop self-immolating, right?

Something like that.

But there also remain like particular cultural expressions, right, within Christianity.

And so it doesn't quite demolish culture or replace it.

but it does kind of provide a unifying positive undergirding.

And to speak a little bit to what you were saying as regards how much we rely on it without realizing, I think a good example that I've noticed lately across like several different examples and experiments and videos and stuff like that is the concept of like integrity, especially as regards like social and public programs.

So I think Christianity is extremely valuable for

trying to ensure that people don't abuse public and social programs that are aimed at, for example, the needy.

And so, there's no surprise that defrauding the government is actually not very difficult.

The government does not have enough employees to monitor all the recipients of government largesse.

And because of that, a significant number of people who try to defraud the government largesse are just going to get away with it.

I think one of the reasons that a lot of like western countries are able to have these big kind of like welfare state systems, which the United States to some degree has this, you see like the Norwegian, you know, what are these, the Slavic now?

Denmark.

What are these countries?

Nordic.

Yeah, Nordic.

That's right.

Not Slavic, Nordic.

The Nordic countries have these and

What they have in common is they're very trust dependent.

In other words, if you got somebody in there who was intentionally exploiting the system, if you get a critical mass of those people, the whole thing actually falls apart.

We were having a book club, well, a colloquium.

a couple weeks ago where we were talking about international trade.

Of course, whenever you talk about international trade in the modern day, you have to talk about China.

One of the readings that we had talked about how China takes kind of the rule systems that the United States has set up, both internally and in international organizations, and they exploit the rule systems.

So the rule systems kind of imply that everybody's going to follow the spirit of the law.

But what China does is they instead take like the lean letter of the law interpretation, but basically undermine the rules within the letter of the law.

And I think the reason that this happens is that in some cultures historically, and this has again been kind of forgotten in the West,

Being dishonest for example, it's actually acceptable so long as you're dishonest to an outsider, right?

There are there are a lot of cultures for which dishonesty is completely allowable and sometimes even morally praiseworthy if it's somebody who's not part of the culture.

That's pretty much foreign to Christianity, right?

Yeah Christ teaching of like who is your neighbor, you know the Good Samaritan parable combined with this idea of like

pursuing the spirit of the law rather than the letter of the law basically squeezes out any sort of like tricky deceptive exception to rules like this, right?

Like if you're a Christian walking in integrity, there's never going to be an instance where you like can get away with like harming somebody else for your benefits and still be following Christianity.

And so I think that's so deep in society's DNA.

that in Western society's DNA that a lot of these systems that we've made that are essentially trust based systems have operated because people have operated under the principles of

I'm not going to try to mess up something for somebody else just because they're an outsider or I'm not going to take advantage of something set up by a different community.

Like those sorts of norms, I don't think work without Christianity.

And I think that's one of the things that America is going to have to grapple with pretty significantly, both internally when there's changes and also in international organizations.

So I was hoping you can maybe comment a little bit the Protestant work ethic.

So Max Weber was

famous, I don't remember the exact date, but at the beginning of the United States of pointing out that Christians and Christianity Protestants had a different way of looking at things and that that was really the seeds of flourishing that would come to be in the United States.

So when you were talking about Western culture and all that, I didn't know if Max Weber came to mind with that being

part or baked into the DNA and that helped cultivate things.

I think that kind of follows exactly what Peter said about that the virtues and vices that we get in Christianity, they just do result in a very particular kind of culture.

And I think as Peter pointed out, it's dangerous to feed, to use the DNA metaphor again, to feed an organism that has been developed

on one from one DNA, if you give it, if you either allow it to ignore the instructions that the DNA has so far governed its growth, or you import in some different DNA, this is terminal usually

to

those biological organisms.

One of the things that I thought that I think really made me think about this was when we did that reading group on

Gerard's

interpretation of

the Gospels.

And he says, one of the things that's really interesting is if you contrast how the Gospels treat sacrifice and scapegoating compared to how the myths do, right?

And I take it that one thing we could say is something like that this reading was like in the Gospels, but we didn't

We actually didn't realize it until much later.

And the thesis that I'm putting forward is something like, that will continue to happen.

There will be meanings that maybe are unavailable to us in the same way that the myth, the critique of sacrifice in myth reading of the gospel was unavailable to a peasant in, you know, 400 AD or whatever, that this is the view on

how a text like the Bible can continue to be relevant and governing for something that is always changing.

Right.

It's fixed, but the reader is getting different messages at different times.

And amazingly, if the organism reads the DNA right, it gets the right message, right?

This isn't a kind of relativism that says there's no wrong reading of it.

If you read DNA wrong, you get cancer, you get, you know, but that there will be

some things that emerge much later on.

I mean, like when people do the analysis of the Bible and they go like, oh my, look at all these connections that maybe weren't there on a first apparent reading.

So, all right,

well, this looks like a good spot for break.

The thing we haven't touched on, and Peter kind of hinted at it, the topic I want to get into, and that's sin.

I think the how sin is baked into the part of the DNA and the forgiveness of sin plays an important role here too, that

in cultivating that culture.

So we'll be back in just a bit.

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Okay, so we're back and I wasn't quite sure how this plugs into maybe the overall thesis here, but I very much think

that sin is baked into people and into their DNA.

And I think it's an important part of how Christians view that.

Peter, earlier you said something along the lines of doing something wrong or being deceitful or whatever that you're not, you know, with Christianity.

I can't remember how you framed it.