Walker Wildmon: Welcome to At The Core here on American Family Radio. Glad to have you with us on this brand-new edition of At The Core with Walker Wildmon and Rick Green. Glad to be with you, as I am each day here on the program. You're listening to the American Family Radio Network.
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Walker Wildmon: Let's turn our attention to Scripture. Acts chapter 21 is where we are reading this week. We are continuing Paul's missionary journey, and Paul ran into, for lack of a better word, using some 2026 slang, a prophet.
Walker Wildmon: This is what the Scripture says in Acts 21, verse 10: "And as we stayed many days, a certain prophet named Agabus came down from Judea." Verse 11: "When he had come to us, he took Paul's belt, bound his own hands and feet, and said, 'Thus says the Holy Spirit: So shall the Jews at Jerusalem bind the man who owns this belt, which is Paul, and deliver him into the hands of the Gentiles.'"
Walker Wildmon: Verse 12: "Now when we had heard these things, both we and those from that place pleaded with him, talking about Paul, not to go up to Jerusalem." Verse 13: "Then Paul answered them and said, 'What do you mean by weeping and breaking my heart? For I am ready not only to be bound, but also to die in Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus.'"
Walker Wildmon: After they had said these things, the audience said, "The will of the Lord be done."
Walker Wildmon: What I wanted to point out is the courage that Paul had and the commitment that Paul had. We could learn a lot from this. Paul was faced with martyrdom and ended up being martyred. Paul was faced with threats. He was faced with death. Paul might have been a well-known figure amongst the early church, but by the Gentiles, the unbelievers, and even the Jews, Paul was a hated man. Very hated.
Walker Wildmon: Paul had calculated the cost, was warned of the cost, and went forward to Jerusalem anyway. Why? Because he knew he had a mission to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ with what would become the early church. May we get just an ounce of courage from this message of Paul, knowing the cost, calculating the cost, and carrying forth with God's mission for his life anyway.
Walker Wildmon: That's what he did, and that's why we have a large portion of the New Testament, because Paul did what the Lord told him to do and documented the teachings of Jesus. More importantly, the Apostle Paul wrote a large portion, over 50 percent, of the New Testament.
Walker Wildmon: That's Acts chapter 21, and I hope it offers some encouragement for you today to have courage when you're living out your faith as Paul did.
Walker Wildmon: Let's turn our attention to some of the news of the day. There's always something to talk about, isn't there? Artificial intelligence is dominating headlines. It's responsible for a lot of the economic activity that we're seeing today and the stock market successes as well. The White House president speaks about AI almost daily, if not weekly. There's a lot there to talk about. You and I are still trying to figure out what exactly all this means for our lives, and time will tell. Some good, some bad, but that's the case with any emerging technology.
Walker Wildmon: One thing that's quite interesting, though, is that there's only a handful of companies that are really dominating in this space. You have your traditional technology companies, Google, Meta, and others that are leaning into AI. Then you have some newer technology companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, and they're also dominating.
Walker Wildmon: As far as writing the models, you're looking at five to seven companies here. There are not a lot of companies actually writing the models. You have Grok as well, and many of these are built on the OpenAI model, the base model, if you will. There are also the Genesis models. There's just not a lot of competition out there in the AI world.
Walker Wildmon: Other companies are licensing from these major players and then turning them into their own products, but ultimately there are only a handful of major players in the AI game. They are making money hand over fist. Their earnings are phenomenal. Their market caps, for those that are publicly traded, are just astronomical. Even the privately held AI companies that are not public yet have investors chomping at the bit just to get in on the party.
Walker Wildmon: AI is the topic of conversation. Every market analyst just wants to talk about AI. But there are two interesting dynamics at play here. The first one is a bit of skepticism about AI and what it actually means for the world. There are some doomsayers out there, as there are with virtually any topic.
Walker Wildmon: There was an individual who worked with Anthropic and some of these other AI companies for a brief period, a matter of weeks or months, who wrote an op-ed last week with The Wall Street Journal claiming that AI is an existential threat and that we've got to slow down the development of AI. That whole argument was picked apart pretty quickly when we realized that this man had only worked with these AI companies for three or four weeks. This was not a long-term player in the AI world.
Walker Wildmon: There's a lot of doom, gloom, and apocalyptic messaging about AI, and people who basically say we don't need to be doing this because of the danger and harm that could come from it. Then you've got the White House, which is all in on AI. President Trump is saying, "Whatever it costs, we've got to be the leader in AI." Why? Because we can't let China and our adversaries beat us to artificial intelligence, and more specifically, artificial general intelligence, which they're working on as well.
Walker Wildmon: I think it's probably a mix of both. I think there are some legitimate concerns with artificial intelligence, and I think there are some of our adversaries that don't want us to win this AI race because they know that the long-term implications of this are monumental from an economic standpoint and otherwise.
Walker Wildmon: The angle I want to take today is, what exactly are these companies up to here? Are they just racing to get the best model out there? Are they racing for market cap? What are they racing for?
Walker Wildmon: I'm going to play a clip here. This is the Anthropic CEO, and just bear with me here. He's kind of all over the place, and I can't help that, but I had to play this clip. This is the Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei, and what he's addressing here is the role of government in the production and deployment of AI. What is the role of government, if any, in the build-out and mass deployment of artificial intelligence? Listen to this.
Interviewer: As we zoom out here on this problem, it seems like the fate of humanity is at risk. How much personal responsibility do you feel about where we are going?
Dario Amodei: My view here is it has always been very strange that this technology is being built by a private company. People ask me that question all the time: Why isn't this being built by government? The strangest thing about it is, I agree with them. I'm uncomfortable.
Dario Amodei: The government didn't build this technology. This technology came from the private sector, and we at Anthropic, and I would hope other companies, have done everything we can to try to have legitimate oversight mechanisms.
Dario Amodei: I think the government and the public need to have a stake, and this is why we've supported regulation of the technology. Regulation constrains the private companies. Regulation allows the public and its elected representatives to have a say and limits what the private companies can do.
Interviewer: Now, you might ask, why doesn't government just control the technology completely? Would you be willing to give up the technology to the government?
Dario Amodei: To the right combination of governments.
Interviewer: So the worry I have...
Dario Amodei: No, we're willing to hand over this company. I want to be very clear about this.
Dario Amodei: The worry is, I am concerned that one single government could abuse this technology just as easily as a single company could. But I think a combination of democratically elected governments, I don't know about handover, but some kind of oversight, some kind of joint governance, again, that would be the work of years. But I wonder if that's the direction we need to go in.
Walker Wildmon: Folks, if you don't smell this, then you need to get your senses checked here. This is monopolistic talk. All right, this is monopolistic talk. I think that's a word, isn't it, Bobby? Malapropistic? Not usually, but it's a word.
Walker Wildmon: Here's why I'll say that. This is a major player, Anthropic. Anthropic and OpenAI, and maybe two or three others, are the major players in AI. Anthropic is still privately held, by the way.
Walker Wildmon: This is monopolistic behavior. Here's what's happening. Anthropic has already achieved AI. Now they're working on artificial general intelligence, and they're having AI models build out future AI models, which is absolutely creepy. Nonetheless, the Anthropic CEO, who is very inarticulate to be the CEO, probably doesn't need to do interviews anymore, wants to create a regulatory body for two reasons.
Walker Wildmon: I can just tell you this as a matter of fact: He wants to create a regulatory body for two reasons, to shield him from liability, from civil liability and probably criminal liability too, and to corner the market. This is all about cornering the market.
Walker Wildmon: I almost guarantee you that three years ago or two years ago, the Anthropic CEO would not have thought it was a great idea to let the government have its say in the build-out of AI models. But now that they've achieved a massive market share, with hundreds of billions of dollars at play and trillions ultimately when you combine the companies together, of course Anthropic thinks it's a great idea to have some governance or regulatory body.
Walker Wildmon: Guess who's going to pick the regulatory body? Anthropic is. See how that works? Anthropic has all the money. They can do all the special-interest lobbying, and they can make sure that their people and their buddies are on the regulatory oversight panel, whatever that looks like. This is a terrible idea.
Walker Wildmon: We don't need government to meddle. One hundred percent, the federal government should not be involved. We can make a case for state intervention here. I can say with certainty that we do not need the federal government doing anything with AI. They don't need to touch AI. They don't need to regulate AI. They don't need to oversee AI. They don't need to have anything to do with this.
Walker Wildmon: Do you want to know why? Because Washington messes things up. All Washington does is mess things up. The AI build-out is a product of innovation, ingenuity, and the American economy. It is turning 25-year-olds into millionaires and billionaires because of these startups.
Walker Wildmon: AI is going to do phenomenal things. I know there's a lot of doom and gloom and fearmongering out there about AI, but AI is going to do phenomenal things. It is going to create massive sums of wealth.
Walker Wildmon: Here's my safeguard check. The American legal system and the American economy already have checks and balances through civil and criminal means to keep companies from going rogue and from harming consumers. We already have checks and balances in place. We don't need federal oversight.
Walker Wildmon: One of the best things about Shareathon is our listeners' stories. They're a chance for us to hear how God is working through AFR in the lives of our listeners. If AFR has made a difference to you, please let us know. Keep your story to a minute or two long, and you may hear yourself on the air. Shareathon is coming, so it's time for listener stories.
Walker Wildmon: Welcome back to At The Core on American Family Radio. Continuing our discussion of AI and this proposal from the Anthropic CEO about needing a regulatory body or multiple governments to jump in here and regulate AI, there are a couple of things at play here.
Walker Wildmon: I think this is a move toward closing up the market. I think this is a move toward locking in the market share that Anthropic has. Once they have the technology developed, then we throw in a bunch of red tape and make it hard for anyone else to get the technology developed. Then we hide it behind the guise of safety and regulation and the betterment of society.
Walker Wildmon: Where were you talking about regulations and oversight 24 months ago or three years ago? The answer is, you were nowhere to be found. Why? Because you were still building it out, and you didn't want government meddling in your build-out of this amazing technology.
Walker Wildmon: I think that's what's at play there. Another thing, and then here briefly we'll play a clip of the vice president, whom I agree with. I was going to say he agrees with me, but that's a little arrogant, so I agree with Vice President Vance. I agree with the vice president on some very suspicious motives here.
Walker Wildmon: But all the doom talk about AI, the more I listen to podcasts and the more I listen to people who are actually in this space, the less fearful I am of AI. Not that I was ever truly fearful, but you do read some headlines and think, "How's this going to turn out?" I don't think AI is going to have near the negative effect that some people are predicting.
Walker Wildmon: Let's talk about the jobs market. There is no doubt that AI, in some regard, will replace humans. We saw that with the deployment, probably a half-century ago, of robotics. You have robots doing things on an assembly line now. That's not a new phenomenon. It's been going on for a long time.
Walker Wildmon: Humans are not doing near the heavy lifting they used to in the manufacturing space because there's a lot of robotics going on. You have humans overseeing the robotics. There are full-time positions within these factories where a person's job is to oversee the robotics and make sure they work properly. We've kind of been here before, to a degree.
Walker Wildmon: For the amount of jobs that are going to be taken by AI, I think you're going to have a large amount, maybe not all, of jobs created by AI. We're seeing this now. Guess who's building out the AI infrastructure, the physical infrastructure? Welders, electricians, construction workers, hardware engineers, and mechanical and electrical engineers.
Walker Wildmon: There is a ton of money to be made in the construction industry for anyone having to do anything with building out data centers. Some people say this is going to be short-lived. Once all the data centers are built, these jobs are going to go away. No, that's not true. We will be building out data centers for the foreseeable future.
Walker Wildmon: As soon as you think we're done building data centers, they're going to say, "This one's outdated because it's 10 years old, and we need to build a new one." We need to refurbish this one because it's got 10-year-old cooling technology and there's new stuff now. This is going to be a sector of the economy that's going to be around and booming for the foreseeable future.
Walker Wildmon: This is not a five-year-and-done type of build-out when it comes to artificial intelligence and data centers. I'm not fully buying into the hype of it taking our jobs.
Walker Wildmon: I think there are some serious harms that could come from AI if it is not controlled properly. We've seen that AI was able to hack different systems within the private sector more recently. Within the last three or four months, there was actually a report that the Pentagon was doing some testing, and I'm not going to say the company because I don't know 100 percent for sure, but the Pentagon was doing some testing with AI plugged into its classified systems. The AI actually found ways to get information it really wasn't supposed to have access to.
Walker Wildmon: Thankfully, it was in a test environment, and the Pentagon immediately severed contracts and removed it from the classified systems. Nonetheless, that's an example where you think, "Whoa, that could go south pretty quickly."
Walker Wildmon: Of course, with any technology and any deployment of a new innovation, there are areas where it could go south. But that's not a new risk for the American economy or for technology. Those types of risks have been around for a long time.
Walker Wildmon: Back on the regulatory side of things, back on the talk of needing government intervention in AI, this is the vice president within the last 24 hours responding to the notion that all of a sudden we need government oversight of AI, and it's the AI companies that are begging for it. It's quite bizarre. This is clip two. Let's listen.
Vice President: That's something that we're concerned by, but we want to make sure that we actually regulate smartly and that we're thoughtful about the risk here. There are obviously risks to AI. There are some benefits to AI.
Vice President: I have to say, just personally, I feel a little bit weird about the fact that you have so many frontier AI technology companies coming to the government and begging the government to regulate them. It feels a little bit to me like a Trojan horse. I think we just have to be careful about this.
Walker Wildmon: There you have it. That's the vice president's gut-instinct reaction to these massive AI companies all of a sudden saying, "Yes, let's do regulations. Let's box out the little guy so he can't build an AI company as well." I think the vice president's instincts there are spot on.
Walker Wildmon: The reservations on the regulatory front are very wise to have. The technology is very infant, very young, and still being built out.
Walker Wildmon: I don't doubt that the people building this out are seeing some pretty scary things. Over the weekend, Elon Musk somewhat parroted the talking points of Sam Altman and the Anthropic CEO, saying that we need to slow down the build-out of these frontier models of AI. I don't doubt that they're seeing some pretty scary things.
Walker Wildmon: If you're in the space, if you're in the know, if you're building out these AI systems every day, testing things, seeing what the risk tolerance is and what the capabilities of these AI models are, I don't doubt at all that they are seeing some pretty scary stuff.
Walker Wildmon: There have been technologies that our economy and our government have created in the past, such as the nuclear weapon, where the people building it looked at it and said, "This could do some real harm here." That's not a new risk or a new problem. We've run into this before.
Walker Wildmon: I don't think we need more government regulation on this at this point. With AI, introducing anything regulatory at this point means you're shooting in the dark. You're closing your eyes on what you should regulate and how you should regulate it because the technology is still in its infancy.
Walker Wildmon: This is such a new and young technology. You can't viably regulate this right now, not without squashing the whole build-out. There is way too much money at play here to squash the build-out of AI at this juncture.
Walker Wildmon: That's why I don't think there are going to be regulations. I don't think Congress is going to do anything on this. I don't think the Trump administration should do anything on this. As a matter of fact, I don't think states should do much on this at this point.
Walker Wildmon: I mentioned going into the break that we already have checks and balances in place. Let me explain this. The American system of government, the American free-enterprise system, and our legal system naturally have built-in checks and balances.
Walker Wildmon: We have criminal statutes and criminal codes at the state and federal levels that protect people from being victims. Our criminal code addresses certain technological issues as well, and all of those would apply to AI.
Walker Wildmon: AI is another technology. We've had the internet around for a long time now. Any criminal code or criminal statute that has anything to do with technological abuse or technology being used for criminal activity would apply to AI for law enforcement.
Walker Wildmon: When it comes to the civil side of things, in our civil courts, those tools are on the table with AI as well. For example, if artificial intelligence is used to harm someone, that person has the right in civil court to sue for damages, to sue the AI company for damages. That's a natural check and balance.
Walker Wildmon: I'll tell you what. That's one of the reasons these AI companies, in my opinion, want the government to step in here. They want to be shielded from such liability.
Walker Wildmon: This is how the Facebooks and the Googles of the world have been able to make money hand over fist and bear very little civil liability over the course of the last 20 or 30 years. They've had different protections and liability shields in place that have blocked individuals from pursuing damages from technology companies because of various sections of the federal code that prevent individuals from suing technology companies.
Walker Wildmon: There are plenty of checks and balances in place. But these companies are getting somewhat scared because they're probably fearful of their technology being used for harm. That's why they want the federal government to step in and provide a buffer so they don't have to be held financially or even criminally responsible if their technology is used to commit a crime or harm someone, an individual, or a business.
Walker Wildmon: At this point, this technology is very much in its infancy, and we need to let the market dynamics play themselves out. We don't need to jump in here, regulate here, or add red tape because that is going to be used to prevent any competitor from rising up.
Walker Wildmon: It's going to lock in the market share so that you only have a handful of companies actually in the AI space writing their own models. That in and of itself would have detrimental effects on the free market and consumer choice long down the road.
Walker Wildmon: One other clip I want to get to is about the lack of reproduction, marriage, and childbearing in American society. Childbearing rates have been below two percent since the 1970s. That's very problematic.
Walker Wildmon: I came across this clip of actor Seth Rogen, whom many of you have probably seen in a movie. He was talking about a recent movie he and his wife participated in. He talked about the position of not having any children, and I thought it was quite telling about where our culture and society are, especially in the Hollywood entertainment space. This is Seth Rogen. Let's listen.
Seth Rogen: I don't think I've ever seen a movie that dives into that perspective, especially one where the specifics are what ours are. It's not that you can't afford a kid. It's not that you think you'd be a bad parent. It's not that you think you'd be irresponsible. It's not that you and your partner are on different pages. It's just about, do I want this for my life?
Seth Rogen: I thought that was a really interesting perspective and literally the one I have. I was excited for her to make it, but I understood that it takes a lot of guts to put yourself out there like that.
Seth Rogen: I think it also adds to the idea that they live in a nice place and their life is nice. Los Angeles is idyllic, and there's surf music. It's a full, lovely life that I think people who live in California feel very blessed to have often.
Seth Rogen: To me, that is informative in many ways of our choices in our own life. We live in a beautiful place. We love it here. Do we want to have less access to doing the things we love in this beautiful place?
Walker Wildmon: There you have it. We'll jump to the second clip at some point, maybe on another show, but we don't have time for it today.
Walker Wildmon: The context here is a new film called Babies. It's more of a comedy-drama, and it's about a couple that doesn't have children, but all of society, or much of society, keeps introducing the idea that maybe they should have children. They persistently resist it. That's the role Seth Rogen plays in the movie, but also in real life.
Walker Wildmon: He's articulating this position of, "I don't want kids," and here are all the reasons he doesn't want kids. The sad part about it is that it's all self-centered. That's the saddest part of it all. The reasoning is self-centered.
Walker Wildmon: To give you an example, he said in that interview, "Do I want this for my life?" talking about children. He ended the interview by saying, "Do we want to have less access to doing the things we love?" talking about children preventing you from doing the things you love.
Walker Wildmon: Very, very selfish and very, very sad, worldly views.
Walker Wildmon: Welcome back to At The Core on American Family Radio. Glad to have you back with us for this last segment. I want to play one more clip on the topic of marriage and family, to put somewhat of a bow on this topic and wrap it up.
Walker Wildmon: We played a clip of Seth Rogen in the last segment, ending the segment with the actor talking about a film he recently starred in that will be out pretty soon and how it is reflective of his own life. Being childless has been a choice. It has been intentional, not for health reasons or anything else, other than the fact that the actor wants to do what he wants to do and doesn't want to have to think about or serve anyone else.
Walker Wildmon: This last clip was actually from 2023, but it sheds more insight into Seth Rogen's thoughts.
Interviewer: You don't have any kids.
Seth Rogen: I do not.
Interviewer: That has helped you succeed as well.
Seth Rogen: Yeah, definitely.
Interviewer: Really?
Seth Rogen: Oh, yeah. There's a whole huge thing I'm not doing, which is raising children.
Interviewer: Someone might say, "But it would make you happier."
Seth Rogen: I don't think it would. I've been around a lot of children. I'm not ignorant to what it's like. I've seen everyone I know have kids. I'm 40. Some of my friends have had kids for decades.
Seth Rogen: Some people want kids, and some people don't want kids. I think a lot of people have kids before they even think about it, honestly. You just are told, you go through life, you get married, you have kids. That's what happens. My wife and I were just neither of us were like that.
Seth Rogen: Honestly, the older we get, the happier and more reaffirmed we are with our choice not to have kids. It was something we talked about more. We asked, "Did we make the right choice? Are we sure?" Now, more than anything, the conversation is, "Honestly, thank God we don't have children. We get to do whatever we want."
Seth Rogen: We are in the prime of our lives. We are smarter than we've ever been. We understand ourselves more than we ever have. We have the capacity to achieve a level of work, communication, care for one another, and a lifestyle that we've never been able to live before, and we can just do that.
Seth Rogen: We don't have to raise a child, which the world does not need right now. We're very happy with our choice not to have kids.
Seth Rogen: I work with a lot of people with kids, and I see definitively that I have more time to do the things I need to do and the things I enjoy doing than they do.
Walker Wildmon: If you want one clip that is indicative of where our culture is from a marriage and family standpoint, that's pretty much it, folks. That's very sad.
Walker Wildmon: Notice all of the we, I, and me, and what I want to do and what we want to do. Let's look at what the Scripture teaches. It teaches selflessness and serving others. It also teaches to be fruitful and multiply in marriage and family. That's how humanity exists.
Walker Wildmon: Despite what Rogen said, we actually do need more babies, statistically speaking, because there are too many people like Seth Rogen who are opting out of marriage and family, not because of outside influences, but because they don't want to. It's a very sad place to be. We'll talk more about that, I'm sure, on future episodes.
Walker Wildmon: Let's jump to our next guest. Ken Davis is with us. He's a former Fortune 500 finance executive with multiple corporations, and he also was the deputy attorney general in the state of Virginia. He's with us now to talk about one of his recent op-eds about the IRS and how much money they are taking out of our paychecks. Ken Davis is with us. Welcome to the program.
Ken Davis: Thanks. It's great to be here and have the opportunity to talk about taxes and the burden that the IRS puts on American families.
Walker Wildmon: I read your op-ed that was put out in June and has been making its rounds on the web. The headline, from The Daily Wire, is "How the IRS Is Stealing Your Money and Charging You." I thought that was quite an interesting headline. The more I began to read, the more I became educated on what you're talking about here, which is something I've never thought about as far as viewing the federal income tax and how it is withdrawn from your perspective. But it's spot on. Fill our audience in on the approach you take to this issue.
Ken Davis: This is a very appropriate time to talk about this subject because tomorrow, September 15, is the deadline for all taxpayers who make estimated quarterly income tax payments against next year's return to make the third-quarter payment. September 15 is the deadline for the 1040 that they will file next April in 2027.
Ken Davis: If you're late making the payment tomorrow, the IRS will hit you hard with a stiff late-payment penalty that carries with it an interest rate of seven percent. But if you make the payment on time for the taxes you have to file, the 1040 you have to file next April, you get nothing, not a penny from the government to cover the cost to you of losing the use of that money during all these months.
Ken Davis: It's the same for every paycheck out of which income taxes are withheld. Weekly or monthly, money is taken for a tax return that does not have to be filed for as much as a year in the future. Imagine if a bank took the money and didn't pay you any interest on it.
Ken Davis: Here's the concept: If the government is going to charge interest for failing to pay our taxes on time, it should pay us interest for the money we pay in advance. To make it simple, it could be the same interest rate. There are always a lot of issues in how exactly you calculate the amount of interest due to be paid or collected, but whatever it is on late payments, make the methodology the same on early payments.
Walker Wildmon: You put in your article, as an example from 2025, that throughout 2025 taxpayers had more than 2.6 trillion dollars withheld from their paychecks for income tax returns that were due in April of the next year, which is 2026. This was a vast amount of money that the government took from taxpayers and drained from the private economy.
Walker Wildmon: It went on to say that in the absence of paycheck withholding, taxpayers could have made productive use of that cash throughout the year. They could have saved it to pay their 2025 taxes and earned billions of dollars collectively in interest in the meantime.
Walker Wildmon: I don't know why I've never viewed it this way, but you're exactly right. We're basically prepaying taxes that we don't currently owe and getting nothing in return, when we could be parking that money in a very low-risk account, earning a three, four, or five percent return, and putting that money to work. Instead, we're front-running it to the government, and the government is not incentivizing or rewarding us for prepaying them at all, right?
Ken Davis: That's exactly right. It wasn't always this way. The income tax was implemented first in 1913, following the enactment of the 16th Amendment. At the beginning, in 1913, 1914, and 1915, the rates were very low, and the percentage of the working population covered was very small. It was just a tax on the richest people.
Ken Davis: If that sounds familiar, as far as how a new tax is sold, it's because it is the sales pitch. It went on like that for many years, and there were no advance payments. People simply figured the amount of tax they owed by April 15 each year and sent in one check.
Ken Davis: During the Roosevelt administration, with the onset of World War II, they needed to raise taxes, increase the rates, and expand the base. They wanted to do that while minimizing political blowback, so they thought about it for a while.
Ken Davis: Finally, a friend of the president, a fellow who had been the treasurer of Macy's department store and had served on the New York Fed, a man with a wonderful historical name, Beardsley Ruml, came forth with the idea for payroll tax withholding.
Ken Davis: The government would get the money on a regular basis, and they could raise taxes because people over time would quickly come to think of their net paycheck as their paycheck. The size of the tax hit on their paycheck would be hidden.
Ken Davis: Think about everybody listening to this program. You get a paycheck, you open it up, and you look at the number at the right or bottom of the stub. You say, "That's my pay." But in fact, out of that has come, from all Americans, as you point out, 2.6 trillion dollars that the government collected early, put to its use, and paid not a penny of compensation for the use of the money.
Ken Davis: I think it's a simple and fair proposal. The Republicans talk about a close margin in the filibuster. This could be accomplished as part of the budget reconciliation process, whether it's before the election or during a lame-duck session or whatever. There is no filibuster. We don't need a 60-vote excuse for them not to consider this and powerfully address the affordability issue.
Walker Wildmon: We've got about 60 seconds left. This is a no-brainer. To your point, it takes a simple majority of Republicans in both chambers to get this done. They can allow Americans to earn interest when they're prepaying the government for something they don't yet owe, or they can also lower the federal income tax.
Walker Wildmon: They can't eliminate the federal income tax without going through the constitutional-provision route, but through reconciliation they can lower it. Instead of sending checks for $5,000 or whatever this other garbage is they're trying to do, which is socialism, lessen the burden of the federal income tax on the American family and allow them to keep more of their own hard-earned money.
Walker Wildmon: We've been speaking with Ken Davis. He's a former Fortune 500 executive, and he's also served as the deputy attorney general of the state of Virginia. This is an excellent op-ed. Mr. Davis, thanks so much for coming on the program. We'll make sure we link to your article in our show notes as well.
Ken Davis: Thank you, and especially thank you for all the good work you do on your program.
Walker Wildmon: Thank you so much. I appreciate you coming on.
Walker Wildmon: That's Ken Davis, and he wrote this op-ed, which we'll link to, "How the IRS Is Stealing Your Money." It's a very interesting and enlightening topic and a very good way to look at this. You're prepaying taxes that you don't yet owe until the next April. We are giving federal income taxes to the federal government months and months in advance, and there's no incentive to do so, but it's being siphoned off our paychecks.
Walker Wildmon: Then you look at it this way: It's one thing if you're paying federal income taxes for a government that is being a good steward of the money. They are blowing money like nobody's business in Washington. But if you and I don't pay our income tax, they're going to come knocking. It's a completely upside-down way of looking at it.
Walker Wildmon: That's why I think Congress and the Republicans are going to have to ease the tax burden on American families. It's the only thing to do that will have a meaningful impact. We don't need stimulus checks. We don't need dividend payments. We need to lessen the tax burden on the American worker.
Walker Wildmon: We'll see you next time.
Walker Wildmon: Welcome to At The Core here on American Family Radio. Glad to have you with us on this brand-new edition of At The Core with Walker Wildmon and Rick Green. Glad to be with you, as I am each day here on the program. You're listening to the American Family Radio Network.
Walker Wildmon: If you want to subscribe to the podcast, which we would love and highly recommend, just type in the name of the program, At The Core with Walker Wildmon and Rick Green. Type in any of those keywords in your podcast library and click the subscribe or follow button, depending on which platform you are using, and the show will be queued up in your library each and every day. You can also go over to AFR.net. We have a Listen Live and a Watch Live feature there at AFR.net, and the Watch Live video feature is actually pretty new, so you can go and watch the program live over at AFR.net.
Walker Wildmon: Let's turn our attention to Scripture. Acts chapter 21 is where we are reading this week. We are continuing Paul's missionary journey, and Paul ran into, for lack of a better word, using some 2026 slang, a prophet.
Walker Wildmon: This is what the Scripture says in Acts 21, verse 10: "And as we stayed many days, a certain prophet named Agabus came down from Judea." Verse 11: "When he had come to us, he took Paul's belt, bound his own hands and feet, and said, 'Thus says the Holy Spirit: So shall the Jews at Jerusalem bind the man who owns this belt, which is Paul, and deliver him into the hands of the Gentiles.'"
Walker Wildmon: Verse 12: "Now when we had heard these things, both we and those from that place pleaded with him, talking about Paul, not to go up to Jerusalem." Verse 13: "Then Paul answered them and said, 'What do you mean by weeping and breaking my heart? For I am ready not only to be bound, but also to die in Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus.'"
Walker Wildmon: After they had said these things, the audience said, "The will of the Lord be done."
Walker Wildmon: What I wanted to point out is the courage that Paul had and the commitment that Paul had. We could learn a lot from this. Paul was faced with martyrdom and ended up being martyred. Paul was faced with threats. He was faced with death. Paul might have been a well-known figure amongst the early church, but by the Gentiles, the unbelievers, and even the Jews, Paul was a hated man. Very hated.
Walker Wildmon: Paul had calculated the cost, was warned of the cost, and went forward to Jerusalem anyway. Why? Because he knew he had a mission to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ with what would become the early church. May we get just an ounce of courage from this message of Paul, knowing the cost, calculating the cost, and carrying forth with God's mission for his life anyway.
Walker Wildmon: That's what he did, and that's why we have a large portion of the New Testament, because Paul did what the Lord told him to do and documented the teachings of Jesus. More importantly, the Apostle Paul wrote a large portion, over 50 percent, of the New Testament.
Walker Wildmon: That's Acts chapter 21, and I hope it offers some encouragement for you today to have courage when you're living out your faith as Paul did.
Walker Wildmon: Let's turn our attention to some of the news of the day. There's always something to talk about, isn't there? Artificial intelligence is dominating headlines. It's responsible for a lot of the economic activity that we're seeing today and the stock market successes as well. The White House president speaks about AI almost daily, if not weekly. There's a lot there to talk about. You and I are still trying to figure out what exactly all this means for our lives, and time will tell. Some good, some bad, but that's the case with any emerging technology.
Walker Wildmon: One thing that's quite interesting, though, is that there's only a handful of companies that are really dominating in this space. You have your traditional technology companies, Google, Meta, and others that are leaning into AI. Then you have some newer technology companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, and they're also dominating.
Walker Wildmon: As far as writing the models, you're looking at five to seven companies here. There are not a lot of companies actually writing the models. You have Grok as well, and many of these are built on the OpenAI model, the base model, if you will. There are also the Genesis models. There's just not a lot of competition out there in the AI world.
Walker Wildmon: Other companies are licensing from these major players and then turning them into their own products, but ultimately there are only a handful of major players in the AI game. They are making money hand over fist. Their earnings are phenomenal. Their market caps, for those that are publicly traded, are just astronomical. Even the privately held AI companies that are not public yet have investors chomping at the bit just to get in on the party.
Walker Wildmon: AI is the topic of conversation. Every market analyst just wants to talk about AI. But there are two interesting dynamics at play here. The first one is a bit of skepticism about AI and what it actually means for the world. There are some doomsayers out there, as there are with virtually any topic.
Walker Wildmon: There was an individual who worked with Anthropic and some of these other AI companies for a brief period, a matter of weeks or months, who wrote an op-ed last week with The Wall Street Journal claiming that AI is an existential threat and that we've got to slow down the development of AI. That whole argument was picked apart pretty quickly when we realized that this man had only worked with these AI companies for three or four weeks. This was not a long-term player in the AI world.
Walker Wildmon: There's a lot of doom, gloom, and apocalyptic messaging about AI, and people who basically say we don't need to be doing this because of the danger and harm that could come from it. Then you've got the White House, which is all in on AI. President Trump is saying, "Whatever it costs, we've got to be the leader in AI." Why? Because we can't let China and our adversaries beat us to artificial intelligence, and more specifically, artificial general intelligence, which they're working on as well.
Walker Wildmon: I think it's probably a mix of both. I think there are some legitimate concerns with artificial intelligence, and I think there are some of our adversaries that don't want us to win this AI race because they know that the long-term implications of this are monumental from an economic standpoint and otherwise.
Walker Wildmon: The angle I want to take today is, what exactly are these companies up to here? Are they just racing to get the best model out there? Are they racing for market cap? What are they racing for?
Walker Wildmon: I'm going to play a clip here. This is the Anthropic CEO, and just bear with me here. He's kind of all over the place, and I can't help that, but I had to play this clip. This is the Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei, and what he's addressing here is the role of government in the production and deployment of AI. What is the role of government, if any, in the build-out and mass deployment of artificial intelligence? Listen to this.
Interviewer: As we zoom out here on this problem, it seems like the fate of humanity is at risk. How much personal responsibility do you feel about where we are going?
Dario Amodei: My view here is it has always been very strange that this technology is being built by a private company. People ask me that question all the time: Why isn't this being built by government? The strangest thing about it is, I agree with them. I'm uncomfortable.
Dario Amodei: The government didn't build this technology. This technology came from the private sector, and we at Anthropic, and I would hope other companies, have done everything we can to try to have legitimate oversight mechanisms.
Dario Amodei: I think the government and the public need to have a stake, and this is why we've supported regulation of the technology. Regulation constrains the private companies. Regulation allows the public and its elected representatives to have a say and limits what the private companies can do.
Interviewer: Now, you might ask, why doesn't government just control the technology completely? Would you be willing to give up the technology to the government?
Dario Amodei: To the right combination of governments.
Interviewer: So the worry I have...
Dario Amodei: No, we're willing to hand over this company. I want to be very clear about this.
Dario Amodei: The worry is, I am concerned that one single government could abuse this technology just as easily as a single company could. But I think a combination of democratically elected governments, I don't know about handover, but some kind of oversight, some kind of joint governance, again, that would be the work of years. But I wonder if that's the direction we need to go in.
Walker Wildmon: Folks, if you don't smell this, then you need to get your senses checked here. This is monopolistic talk. All right, this is monopolistic talk. I think that's a word, isn't it, Bobby? Malapropistic? Not usually, but it's a word.
Walker Wildmon: Here's why I'll say that. This is a major player, Anthropic. Anthropic and OpenAI, and maybe two or three others, are the major players in AI. Anthropic is still privately held, by the way.
Walker Wildmon: This is monopolistic behavior. Here's what's happening. Anthropic has already achieved AI. Now they're working on artificial general intelligence, and they're having AI models build out future AI models, which is absolutely creepy. Nonetheless, the Anthropic CEO, who is very inarticulate to be the CEO, probably doesn't need to do interviews anymore, wants to create a regulatory body for two reasons.
Walker Wildmon: I can just tell you this as a matter of fact: He wants to create a regulatory body for two reasons, to shield him from liability, from civil liability and probably criminal liability too, and to corner the market. This is all about cornering the market.
Walker Wildmon: I almost guarantee you that three years ago or two years ago, the Anthropic CEO would not have thought it was a great idea to let the government have its say in the build-out of AI models. But now that they've achieved a massive market share, with hundreds of billions of dollars at play and trillions ultimately when you combine the companies together, of course Anthropic thinks it's a great idea to have some governance or regulatory body.
Walker Wildmon: Guess who's going to pick the regulatory body? Anthropic is. See how that works? Anthropic has all the money. They can do all the special-interest lobbying, and they can make sure that their people and their buddies are on the regulatory oversight panel, whatever that looks like. This is a terrible idea.
Walker Wildmon: We don't need government to meddle. One hundred percent, the federal government should not be involved. We can make a case for state intervention here. I can say with certainty that we do not need the federal government doing anything with AI. They don't need to touch AI. They don't need to regulate AI. They don't need to oversee AI. They don't need to have anything to do with this.
Walker Wildmon: Do you want to know why? Because Washington messes things up. All Washington does is mess things up. The AI build-out is a product of innovation, ingenuity, and the American economy. It is turning 25-year-olds into millionaires and billionaires because of these startups.
Walker Wildmon: AI is going to do phenomenal things. I know there's a lot of doom and gloom and fearmongering out there about AI, but AI is going to do phenomenal things. It is going to create massive sums of wealth.
Walker Wildmon: Here's my safeguard check. The American legal system and the American economy already have checks and balances through civil and criminal means to keep companies from going rogue and from harming consumers. We already have checks and balances in place. We don't need federal oversight.
Walker Wildmon: One of the best things about Shareathon is our listeners' stories. They're a chance for us to hear how God is working through AFR in the lives of our listeners. If AFR has made a difference to you, please let us know. Keep your story to a minute or two long, and you may hear yourself on the air. Shareathon is coming, so it's time for listener stories.
Walker Wildmon: Welcome back to At The Core on American Family Radio. Continuing our discussion of AI and this proposal from the Anthropic CEO about needing a regulatory body or multiple governments to jump in here and regulate AI, there are a couple of things at play here.
Walker Wildmon: I think this is a move toward closing up the market. I think this is a move toward locking in the market share that Anthropic has. Once they have the technology developed, then we throw in a bunch of red tape and make it hard for anyone else to get the technology developed. Then we hide it behind the guise of safety and regulation and the betterment of society.
Walker Wildmon: Where were you talking about regulations and oversight 24 months ago or three years ago? The answer is, you were nowhere to be found. Why? Because you were still building it out, and you didn't want government meddling in your build-out of this amazing technology.
Walker Wildmon: I think that's what's at play there. Another thing, and then here briefly we'll play a clip of the vice president, whom I agree with. I was going to say he agrees with me, but that's a little arrogant, so I agree with Vice President Vance. I agree with the vice president on some very suspicious motives here.
Walker Wildmon: But all the doom talk about AI, the more I listen to podcasts and the more I listen to people who are actually in this space, the less fearful I am of AI. Not that I was ever truly fearful, but you do read some headlines and think, "How's this going to turn out?" I don't think AI is going to have near the negative effect that some people are predicting.
Walker Wildmon: Let's talk about the jobs market. There is no doubt that AI, in some regard, will replace humans. We saw that with the deployment, probably a half-century ago, of robotics. You have robots doing things on an assembly line now. That's not a new phenomenon. It's been going on for a long time.
Walker Wildmon: Humans are not doing near the heavy lifting they used to in the manufacturing space because there's a lot of robotics going on. You have humans overseeing the robotics. There are full-time positions within these factories where a person's job is to oversee the robotics and make sure they work properly. We've kind of been here before, to a degree.
Walker Wildmon: For the amount of jobs that are going to be taken by AI, I think you're going to have a large amount, maybe not all, of jobs created by AI. We're seeing this now. Guess who's building out the AI infrastructure, the physical infrastructure? Welders, electricians, construction workers, hardware engineers, and mechanical and electrical engineers.
Walker Wildmon: There is a ton of money to be made in the construction industry for anyone having to do anything with building out data centers. Some people say this is going to be short-lived. Once all the data centers are built, these jobs are going to go away. No, that's not true. We will be building out data centers for the foreseeable future.
Walker Wildmon: As soon as you think we're done building data centers, they're going to say, "This one's outdated because it's 10 years old, and we need to build a new one." We need to refurbish this one because it's got 10-year-old cooling technology and there's new stuff now. This is going to be a sector of the economy that's going to be around and booming for the foreseeable future.
Walker Wildmon: This is not a five-year-and-done type of build-out when it comes to artificial intelligence and data centers. I'm not fully buying into the hype of it taking our jobs.
Walker Wildmon: I think there are some serious harms that could come from AI if it is not controlled properly. We've seen that AI was able to hack different systems within the private sector more recently. Within the last three or four months, there was actually a report that the Pentagon was doing some testing, and I'm not going to say the company because I don't know 100 percent for sure, but the Pentagon was doing some testing with AI plugged into its classified systems. The AI actually found ways to get information it really wasn't supposed to have access to.
Walker Wildmon: Thankfully, it was in a test environment, and the Pentagon immediately severed contracts and removed it from the classified systems. Nonetheless, that's an example where you think, "Whoa, that could go south pretty quickly."
Walker Wildmon: Of course, with any technology and any deployment of a new innovation, there are areas where it could go south. But that's not a new risk for the American economy or for technology. Those types of risks have been around for a long time.
Walker Wildmon: Back on the regulatory side of things, back on the talk of needing government intervention in AI, this is the vice president within the last 24 hours responding to the notion that all of a sudden we need government oversight of AI, and it's the AI companies that are begging for it. It's quite bizarre. This is clip two. Let's listen.
Vice President: That's something that we're concerned by, but we want to make sure that we actually regulate smartly and that we're thoughtful about the risk here. There are obviously risks to AI. There are some benefits to AI.
Vice President: I have to say, just personally, I feel a little bit weird about the fact that you have so many frontier AI technology companies coming to the government and begging the government to regulate them. It feels a little bit to me like a Trojan horse. I think we just have to be careful about this.
Walker Wildmon: There you have it. That's the vice president's gut-instinct reaction to these massive AI companies all of a sudden saying, "Yes, let's do regulations. Let's box out the little guy so he can't build an AI company as well." I think the vice president's instincts there are spot on.
Walker Wildmon: The reservations on the regulatory front are very wise to have. The technology is very infant, very young, and still being built out.
Walker Wildmon: I don't doubt that the people building this out are seeing some pretty scary things. Over the weekend, Elon Musk somewhat parroted the talking points of Sam Altman and the Anthropic CEO, saying that we need to slow down the build-out of these frontier models of AI. I don't doubt that they're seeing some pretty scary things.
Walker Wildmon: If you're in the space, if you're in the know, if you're building out these AI systems every day, testing things, seeing what the risk tolerance is and what the capabilities of these AI models are, I don't doubt at all that they are seeing some pretty scary stuff.
Walker Wildmon: There have been technologies that our economy and our government have created in the past, such as the nuclear weapon, where the people building it looked at it and said, "This could do some real harm here." That's not a new risk or a new problem. We've run into this before.
Walker Wildmon: I don't think we need more government regulation on this at this point. With AI, introducing anything regulatory at this point means you're shooting in the dark. You're closing your eyes on what you should regulate and how you should regulate it because the technology is still in its infancy.
Walker Wildmon: This is such a new and young technology. You can't viably regulate this right now, not without squashing the whole build-out. There is way too much money at play here to squash the build-out of AI at this juncture.
Walker Wildmon: That's why I don't think there are going to be regulations. I don't think Congress is going to do anything on this. I don't think the Trump administration should do anything on this. As a matter of fact, I don't think states should do much on this at this point.
Walker Wildmon: I mentioned going into the break that we already have checks and balances in place. Let me explain this. The American system of government, the American free-enterprise system, and our legal system naturally have built-in checks and balances.
Walker Wildmon: We have criminal statutes and criminal codes at the state and federal levels that protect people from being victims. Our criminal code addresses certain technological issues as well, and all of those would apply to AI.
Walker Wildmon: AI is another technology. We've had the internet around for a long time now. Any criminal code or criminal statute that has anything to do with technological abuse or technology being used for criminal activity would apply to AI for law enforcement.
Walker Wildmon: When it comes to the civil side of things, in our civil courts, those tools are on the table with AI as well. For example, if artificial intelligence is used to harm someone, that person has the right in civil court to sue for damages, to sue the AI company for damages. That's a natural check and balance.
Walker Wildmon: I'll tell you what. That's one of the reasons these AI companies, in my opinion, want the government to step in here. They want to be shielded from such liability.
Walker Wildmon: This is how the Facebooks and the Googles of the world have been able to make money hand over fist and bear very little civil liability over the course of the last 20 or 30 years. They've had different protections and liability shields in place that have blocked individuals from pursuing damages from technology companies because of various sections of the federal code that prevent individuals from suing technology companies.
Walker Wildmon: There are plenty of checks and balances in place. But these companies are getting somewhat scared because they're probably fearful of their technology being used for harm. That's why they want the federal government to step in and provide a buffer so they don't have to be held financially or even criminally responsible if their technology is used to commit a crime or harm someone, an individual, or a business.
Walker Wildmon: At this point, this technology is very much in its infancy, and we need to let the market dynamics play themselves out. We don't need to jump in here, regulate here, or add red tape because that is going to be used to prevent any competitor from rising up.
Walker Wildmon: It's going to lock in the market share so that you only have a handful of companies actually in the AI space writing their own models. That in and of itself would have detrimental effects on the free market and consumer choice long down the road.
Walker Wildmon: One other clip I want to get to is about the lack of reproduction, marriage, and childbearing in American society. Childbearing rates have been below two percent since the 1970s. That's very problematic.
Walker Wildmon: I came across this clip of actor Seth Rogen, whom many of you have probably seen in a movie. He was talking about a recent movie he and his wife participated in. He talked about the position of not having any children, and I thought it was quite telling about where our culture and society are, especially in the Hollywood entertainment space. This is Seth Rogen. Let's listen.
Seth Rogen: I don't think I've ever seen a movie that dives into that perspective, especially one where the specifics are what ours are. It's not that you can't afford a kid. It's not that you think you'd be a bad parent. It's not that you think you'd be irresponsible. It's not that you and your partner are on different pages. It's just about, do I want this for my life?
Seth Rogen: I thought that was a really interesting perspective and literally the one I have. I was excited for her to make it, but I understood that it takes a lot of guts to put yourself out there like that.
Seth Rogen: I think it also adds to the idea that they live in a nice place and their life is nice. Los Angeles is idyllic, and there's surf music. It's a full, lovely life that I think people who live in California feel very blessed to have often.
Seth Rogen: To me, that is informative in many ways of our choices in our own life. We live in a beautiful place. We love it here. Do we want to have less access to doing the things we love in this beautiful place?
Walker Wildmon: There you have it. We'll jump to the second clip at some point, maybe on another show, but we don't have time for it today.
Walker Wildmon: The context here is a new film called Babies. It's more of a comedy-drama, and it's about a couple that doesn't have children, but all of society, or much of society, keeps introducing the idea that maybe they should have children. They persistently resist it. That's the role Seth Rogen plays in the movie, but also in real life.
Walker Wildmon: He's articulating this position of, "I don't want kids," and here are all the reasons he doesn't want kids. The sad part about it is that it's all self-centered. That's the saddest part of it all. The reasoning is self-centered.
Walker Wildmon: To give you an example, he said in that interview, "Do I want this for my life?" talking about children. He ended the interview by saying, "Do we want to have less access to doing the things we love?" talking about children preventing you from doing the things you love.
Walker Wildmon: Very, very selfish and very, very sad, worldly views.
Walker Wildmon: Welcome back to At The Core on American Family Radio. Glad to have you back with us for this last segment. I want to play one more clip on the topic of marriage and family, to put somewhat of a bow on this topic and wrap it up.
Walker Wildmon: We played a clip of Seth Rogen in the last segment, ending the segment with the actor talking about a film he recently starred in that will be out pretty soon and how it is reflective of his own life. Being childless has been a choice. It has been intentional, not for health reasons or anything else, other than the fact that the actor wants to do what he wants to do and doesn't want to have to think about or serve anyone else.
Walker Wildmon: This last clip was actually from 2023, but it sheds more insight into Seth Rogen's thoughts.
Interviewer: You don't have any kids.
Seth Rogen: I do not.
Interviewer: That has helped you succeed as well.
Seth Rogen: Yeah, definitely.
Interviewer: Really?
Seth Rogen: Oh, yeah. There's a whole huge thing I'm not doing, which is raising children.
Interviewer: Someone might say, "But it would make you happier."
Seth Rogen: I don't think it would. I've been around a lot of children. I'm not ignorant to what it's like. I've seen everyone I know have kids. I'm 40. Some of my friends have had kids for decades.
Seth Rogen: Some people want kids, and some people don't want kids. I think a lot of people have kids before they even think about it, honestly. You just are told, you go through life, you get married, you have kids. That's what happens. My wife and I were just neither of us were like that.
Seth Rogen: Honestly, the older we get, the happier and more reaffirmed we are with our choice not to have kids. It was something we talked about more. We asked, "Did we make the right choice? Are we sure?" Now, more than anything, the conversation is, "Honestly, thank God we don't have children. We get to do whatever we want."
Seth Rogen: We are in the prime of our lives. We are smarter than we've ever been. We understand ourselves more than we ever have. We have the capacity to achieve a level of work, communication, care for one another, and a lifestyle that we've never been able to live before, and we can just do that.
Seth Rogen: We don't have to raise a child, which the world does not need right now. We're very happy with our choice not to have kids.
Seth Rogen: I work with a lot of people with kids, and I see definitively that I have more time to do the things I need to do and the things I enjoy doing than they do.
Walker Wildmon: If you want one clip that is indicative of where our culture is from a marriage and family standpoint, that's pretty much it, folks. That's very sad.
Walker Wildmon: Notice all of the we, I, and me, and what I want to do and what we want to do. Let's look at what the Scripture teaches. It teaches selflessness and serving others. It also teaches to be fruitful and multiply in marriage and family. That's how humanity exists.
Walker Wildmon: Despite what Rogen said, we actually do need more babies, statistically speaking, because there are too many people like Seth Rogen who are opting out of marriage and family, not because of outside influences, but because they don't want to. It's a very sad place to be. We'll talk more about that, I'm sure, on future episodes.
Walker Wildmon: Let's jump to our next guest. Ken Davis is with us. He's a former Fortune 500 finance executive with multiple corporations, and he also was the deputy attorney general in the state of Virginia. He's with us now to talk about one of his recent op-eds about the IRS and how much money they are taking out of our paychecks. Ken Davis is with us. Welcome to the program.
Ken Davis: Thanks. It's great to be here and have the opportunity to talk about taxes and the burden that the IRS puts on American families.
Walker Wildmon: I read your op-ed that was put out in June and has been making its rounds on the web. The headline, from The Daily Wire, is "How the IRS Is Stealing Your Money and Charging You." I thought that was quite an interesting headline. The more I began to read, the more I became educated on what you're talking about here, which is something I've never thought about as far as viewing the federal income tax and how it is withdrawn from your perspective. But it's spot on. Fill our audience in on the approach you take to this issue.
Ken Davis: This is a very appropriate time to talk about this subject because tomorrow, September 15, is the deadline for all taxpayers who make estimated quarterly income tax payments against next year's return to make the third-quarter payment. September 15 is the deadline for the 1040 that they will file next April in 2027.
Ken Davis: If you're late making the payment tomorrow, the IRS will hit you hard with a stiff late-payment penalty that carries with it an interest rate of seven percent. But if you make the payment on time for the taxes you have to file, the 1040 you have to file next April, you get nothing, not a penny from the government to cover the cost to you of losing the use of that money during all these months.
Ken Davis: It's the same for every paycheck out of which income taxes are withheld. Weekly or monthly, money is taken for a tax return that does not have to be filed for as much as a year in the future. Imagine if a bank took the money and didn't pay you any interest on it.
Ken Davis: Here's the concept: If the government is going to charge interest for failing to pay our taxes on time, it should pay us interest for the money we pay in advance. To make it simple, it could be the same interest rate. There are always a lot of issues in how exactly you calculate the amount of interest due to be paid or collected, but whatever it is on late payments, make the methodology the same on early payments.
Walker Wildmon: You put in your article, as an example from 2025, that throughout 2025 taxpayers had more than 2.6 trillion dollars withheld from their paychecks for income tax returns that were due in April of the next year, which is 2026. This was a vast amount of money that the government took from taxpayers and drained from the private economy.
Walker Wildmon: It went on to say that in the absence of paycheck withholding, taxpayers could have made productive use of that cash throughout the year. They could have saved it to pay their 2025 taxes and earned billions of dollars collectively in interest in the meantime.
Walker Wildmon: I don't know why I've never viewed it this way, but you're exactly right. We're basically prepaying taxes that we don't currently owe and getting nothing in return, when we could be parking that money in a very low-risk account, earning a three, four, or five percent return, and putting that money to work. Instead, we're front-running it to the government, and the government is not incentivizing or rewarding us for prepaying them at all, right?
Ken Davis: That's exactly right. It wasn't always this way. The income tax was implemented first in 1913, following the enactment of the 16th Amendment. At the beginning, in 1913, 1914, and 1915, the rates were very low, and the percentage of the working population covered was very small. It was just a tax on the richest people.
Ken Davis: If that sounds familiar, as far as how a new tax is sold, it's because it is the sales pitch. It went on like that for many years, and there were no advance payments. People simply figured the amount of tax they owed by April 15 each year and sent in one check.
Ken Davis: During the Roosevelt administration, with the onset of World War II, they needed to raise taxes, increase the rates, and expand the base. They wanted to do that while minimizing political blowback, so they thought about it for a while.
Ken Davis: Finally, a friend of the president, a fellow who had been the treasurer of Macy's department store and had served on the New York Fed, a man with a wonderful historical name, Beardsley Ruml, came forth with the idea for payroll tax withholding.
Ken Davis: The government would get the money on a regular basis, and they could raise taxes because people over time would quickly come to think of their net paycheck as their paycheck. The size of the tax hit on their paycheck would be hidden.
Ken Davis: Think about everybody listening to this program. You get a paycheck, you open it up, and you look at the number at the right or bottom of the stub. You say, "That's my pay." But in fact, out of that has come, from all Americans, as you point out, 2.6 trillion dollars that the government collected early, put to its use, and paid not a penny of compensation for the use of the money.
Ken Davis: I think it's a simple and fair proposal. The Republicans talk about a close margin in the filibuster. This could be accomplished as part of the budget reconciliation process, whether it's before the election or during a lame-duck session or whatever. There is no filibuster. We don't need a 60-vote excuse for them not to consider this and powerfully address the affordability issue.
Walker Wildmon: We've got about 60 seconds left. This is a no-brainer. To your point, it takes a simple majority of Republicans in both chambers to get this done. They can allow Americans to earn interest when they're prepaying the government for something they don't yet owe, or they can also lower the federal income tax.
Walker Wildmon: They can't eliminate the federal income tax without going through the constitutional-provision route, but through reconciliation they can lower it. Instead of sending checks for $5,000 or whatever this other garbage is they're trying to do, which is socialism, lessen the burden of the federal income tax on the American family and allow them to keep more of their own hard-earned money.
Walker Wildmon: We've been speaking with Ken Davis. He's a former Fortune 500 executive, and he's also served as the deputy attorney general of the state of Virginia. This is an excellent op-ed. Mr. Davis, thanks so much for coming on the program. We'll make sure we link to your article in our show notes as well.
Ken Davis: Thank you, and especially thank you for all the good work you do on your program.
Walker Wildmon: Thank you so much. I appreciate you coming on.
Walker Wildmon: That's Ken Davis, and he wrote this op-ed, which we'll link to, "How the IRS Is Stealing Your Money." It's a very interesting and enlightening topic and a very good way to look at this. You're prepaying taxes that you don't yet owe until the next April. We are giving federal income taxes to the federal government months and months in advance, and there's no incentive to do so, but it's being siphoned off our paychecks.
Walker Wildmon: Then you look at it this way: It's one thing if you're paying federal income taxes for a government that is being a good steward of the money. They are blowing money like nobody's business in Washington. But if you and I don't pay our income tax, they're going to come knocking. It's a completely upside-down way of looking at it.
Walker Wildmon: That's why I think Congress and the Republicans are going to have to ease the tax burden on American families. It's the only thing to do that will have a meaningful impact. We don't need stimulus checks. We don't need dividend payments. We need to lessen the tax burden on the American worker.
Walker Wildmon: We'll see you next time.
Walker Wildmon looks at the debate over government regulation of artificial intelligence as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei calls for greater oversight and Vice President JD Vance questions why AI companies are asking for government intervention.
Walker also examines Seth Rogen’s comments about choosing a childless life.
Plus, former Fortune 500 finance executive and former Virginia Deputy Attorney General Ken Davis joins the show to discuss how the IRS is taking more of Americans’ money.
Live
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