Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Acton Line podcast: Elizabeth Warren wants $3 trillion tax hike; Mark Hall on America’s Christian founding
Acton Line podcast: Elizabeth Warren wants $3 trillion tax hike; Mark Hall on America’s Christian founding
Aug 29, 2026 4:15 PM

Massachusetts Democratic Senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has proposed to increase taxes for big businesses and high earners to rake in nearly $3 trillion per year. Warren plans to use this tax to fund spending in health care, education, and family benefits, and as a result, according to Warren, the economy would grow. Are economists in agreement with Warren? What would increased taxes on the wealthy do for the economy? Dave Hebert, professor of economics and director of the Center for Markets, Ethics, and Entrepreneurship at Aquinas College, lays it out. On the second segment, Mark Hall, professor at George Fox University, joins the show to discuss his new book, Did America Have a Christian Founding? It’s a perennial question: how did the Judeo-Christian worldview under gird America’s founding and why is this question worth asking? Hall explains the main arguments in his book and dispels mon myths surrounding America’s founders.

Check out additional resources for this episode:

Read: “Reality check on Elizabeth Warren’s biggest ideas”

Read: “Could Tax Increases Speed Up the Economy? Democrats Say Yes”

Read: “The Rich Really Do Pay Lower Taxes Than You”

Purchase Did America Have a Christian Founding?: Separating Modern Myth from Historical Truthby Mark David Hall

Read: Mythbusters: American Founding Edition — Review of Mark David Hall’s Did America Have a Christian Founding?

Read: “Faith of our Founders: The role of religion in America’s founding”

New to the Acton Line podcast? Subscribe here! We also mend starting with these episodes:

Do you have feedback for the Acton Line podcast team? We want to hear from you! Email us at [email protected]. If you like Acton Line, don’t forget to leave a rating and review on the Apple podcast app!

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Rise of the ‘super-neo-reverse Malthusians’
The doom delusions of central planners and population “experts” are well documented and refuted, ranging fromthe early pessimism of the Rev. Thomas Robert Malthustothe morefanatical predictions of Paul Ehrlich. Through these lenses,population growth is a driver of poverty, following from a framing of the human person asa strain and a drain on society and the environment. As Michael Mattheson Miller has written, such thinking suffers from a zero-sum mindset wherein the economy (or any web of human relationships) is a...
‘For God and Profit’ Review: Christianity is pro-profit and pro-property
Benedikt Koehler, writing for Reaction, recently reviewed Samuel Gregg’s latest, For God and Profit. Koehler is an author whose books and articles focus on the history of economic thought. He starts the review by offering some background on why Gregg’s book is so important, citing events like the financial crisis of 2008 and some of Pope Francis’ critiques of capitalism. Then Koehler begins to dig into some of the details of Gregg’s book: The es in two halves. The first...
Explainer: What you should know about the Constitution Party platform
Note: This is the fifthin a series examining the positions of several minorparty and independent presidential candidates onissues covered by the Acton Institute. A previous series covered the Democratic Party platform (see here and here) and the Republican Party Platform (see here and here). Although minor parties—often called “third parties” to distinguish them from the dominant two—have always been a part of American politics, the dissatisfaction with the Republican and Democratic parties in the current election season has led some...
Samuel Gregg on the Regensburg Address, Ratzinger, and reason
In a new article for Public Discourse, Samuel Gregg, the Director of Research at Acton, talks about the “Regensburg Address” and what it means 10 years later. Benedict XVI’s speech at the University of Regensburg on September 12, 2006 “managed to identifytheinner pathology that is corroding much of the world, how this malignancy emerged, and what can be done to address it.” According to Gregg, this speech “showed how a collapse of faith in full-bodied conceptions of reason explains so...
The financial mess of the Vatican
The finances of the Catholic Church, and more specifically of the Vatican, are quite the mess. When Pope Francis was elected, he recognized this problem and appointed Australian Cardinal George Pell as the inaugural Prefect of the Secretariat of the Economy. Cardinal Pell was given the authority and the task to clean up the finances of the Vatican, something that has been an issue since the mid-1970s. But now reports are surfacing that Pell is losing his authority to make...
The idea equation for economic growth
The key to creating economic flourishing is economic growth and the key to creating long-term economic growth is to create new ideas. But whatis the key to creating ideas that lead to innovation? EconomistAlex Tabarrok says the idea equation goes like this:Ideas = Population x Incentives x Ideas/per hour This equation is a useful way to lay out the factors affecting idea production, says Tabarrok in the video below. When we understand the factors behind production, then we can better...
Orthodox Theology, Morality, and Impersonal Markets
Today at Public Orthodoxy, the blog of the Orthodox Christian Studies Center of Fordham University, I have an essay on the need for Orthodox theology to more seriously engage modern economic science. The argument would likely apply in some degree to other theological traditions as well. I write, Personal relationships and the monastic life have different norms than impersonal markets. This does not mean that markets have no norms, nor that the norms of markets should overrule any other concerns....
Hunger in America is on the decline
In policy and social science hunger is defined as a condition in which a person, for a sustained period, is unable to eat sufficient food to meet basic nutritional needs. While the vast majority of people who suffer from hunger live in developing countries, far too many people in America also suffer from hunger. Determining how many are affected, though, is made more difficult because we do not have an exact way to identify who lacks food. mon proxy is...
Mike Rowe interviews Charles Koch on work, cronyism, and criminal justice reform
Mike Rowe was recently criticized for his new partnership with Charles Koch, CEO of Koch Industries, whose philanthropy for conservative and libertarian causes routinely garners controversy, despite its tremendous fruits. Rowe, himself an increasingly provocative figure, recently interviewed Koch on their core areas of collaboration, including work, the trades, cronyism, higher education, and criminal justice reform. Koch on the politicization of “work ethic”: Unless you learn to work by the time you’re in your 30s, you’re never that productive. So...
Religious healthcare workers have a professional obligation to follow their conscience
For centuries, doctors subscribed to the Hippocratic Oath, a vow that includes admonitions against abortion, assisted suicide, and euthanasia. This oath formed the core of Western medical ethics and provided a boundary marker for a physician’s conscience by outlining an ethic of neighbor love (Cf Rom 13:8-10). But for decades the Hippocratic ideal and the Christians concept of neighbor love have been eroded in the medical field by unethical bioethicists. So it’s not surprising that we now find some bioethicists...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2026 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved