Transcript
The Jacobsen Group with Jon Jacobsen · Mon Sep 30, 2024
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J.D.
Pete is an iconic figure in Democratic Party circles He has guided as a wise sage campaigns from literally municipal state legislative and state courthouse levels constitutional offices gubernatorial all the way through us senate house races all the way to the White House itself Pete has been an advisor and Pete we're trying to handicap this race Pete the electoral college is what it's about.
I don't trust
Generic national polls of Trump v. Harris Harris v. Trump because it's gonna come down to battleground states Pete you have a very good sense of what's going on in Democratic circles You probably have a little bit of knowledge about some internal polling going on Let's kick it over to you.
It is getting to be crunch time a lot has happened just in the last week since we last talked Pete including
what looks to be a second assassination attempt, where are we peed right now in this race?
If the election were held today, and first of all, thank you for all of your compliments, none of them are earned and all of them are appreciated.
If the election were held today, the Dems pulled 287 electoral votes, just like last time we spoke, Republicans are all but guaranteed 218.
There are 33 genuine toss-ups.
But I think six of those are soft, but I'm going with conservative estimate there out of Nevada, even though the boots on the ground for the Senate candidate indicate that she's significantly ahead.
So the dam in Arizona is plus six.
I think all signs indicate that the Harris Walls campaign is tighter in Arizona.
Nevada's a little more of a gut feeling talking to people there.
So I think those three states of the toss-ups
I think Pennsylvania is much more in play.
The dirty little secret is North Carolina, and so I would like to dig in a little bit on states that begin with N for 500, John.
I was going to say, Pete, this is curious because when we originally started this dialogue months ago, when President Biden was on the race, I had it at 270 Biden, 268 Trump, incorporated into my calculus to write those numbers.
I had Nebraska O2 going for Biden at the time, and I presumed that Trump would take back essentially North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, but I still gave Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin to Biden, and that's how I arrived at my math.
Now, that 287 number that you're banding about is 17 additional electoral votes.
Where are you pulling those from?
I have a feeling, state's beginning with N, with Epi, North Carolina and Nevada.
Talk to me.
So no, I took Nevada off the map from last time we spoke, just because I want to be a little more cautious.
So where'd you find these other 17 electoral votes?
I'm really intrigued now.
16, in fact.
And I'm looking at North Carolina as a result of the implosion of the North Carolina GOP and field operation.
In fact, that
their nominee for governor.
And again, a vote for governor is different than a vote for Senate.
Very different than a vote for president.
But the collapse of the North Carolina GOP in the last 36 hours is something that states tend not to be able to fix.
And I'm not going to get into the details.
People can look them up themselves as long as there's no children here, president.
But there's some real, real rough stuff at the top of the ticket in North Carolina in their state election with their lieutenant governor.
was the nominee
and
it's x-rated and it's every it's quite out there
so you're not talking about Kamala and Oprah and P Diddy and those guys hanging together
you're talking about another problem I'm talking about the GOP nominee for governor
yeah
the interesting thing here so you can do your own research your people can
do their own research on the scandal
that is dragged down
Mark Robinson, which is why he was disinvited from today's Trump earlier.
But there's a little quirk of North Carolina law.
And that candidate had until midnight on Thursday to withdraw.
And he didn't.
So North Carolina law acquires that his name will be on the ballot, even if he drops out or if the party replaces him.
I want all of our listeners here, Democrat, Republican, and Independent.
This is why we have only the best people on our show.
So North Carolina, there's trouble over there.
Big trouble.
Do you think that gives a lean to
the blue?
Yeah, I do.
And it's not a positive lean.
It's a negative lean.
I think that the GOP there is demoralized.
And if you look at some of the commentary from GOP leadership, they just want to clean their hands, and they're not able to.
I find it unlikely that the GOP
Recovers from that and of course that's that's a target of opportunity for the Harris campaign But they've always been in a point and they've got a Democratic governor my guy was within a point last time I think Obama won once maybe twice can't remember.
So yeah, it's but it's tough I mean my my side knows this from from Iowa when a political party implodes in a state
real
tough to get back And especially when you're watching in real time this is happening in in North Carolina So all things being equal today
I've got to give the Dems a slight edge in North Carolina.
It's a fascinating take, yeah, yeah.
Taking Georgia off the map just because I think it's too close to call right now, but I think that's an educated guess.
Sure.
And of course, these change on a daily basis.
Well,
Pete, let's go next door, because I'm going to throw something back at you.
My sources tell me that Virginia is looking surprisingly, if not astonishingly good,
for the GOP right now at the presidential level, particularly with some incredible early voting numbers that are coming in for the GOP, is Virginia in play?
I have not had Virginia in play for Team Red.
I don't see how the population is very favorable.
There's a really strong governor's candidate there.
I don't see it, but let's take a look at...
today's poll, which puts Harris up almost seven points in Virginia from the aggregator that I have used from day one.
So they like it, like it or whether I don't like
Yeah, that trajectory has been quite flat.
Trump is up three.
He's up three tenths of a percent from from where he was a week ago, which is movement.
But if all things being equal, I'll take pushing 50 percent over over pushing
42% or 43% any day.
Where do you have PA right now?
Because PA, if that went into the Trump column, could give him the victory.
Obviously, it is so close conceivably yet in the electoral college standpoint that the Nebraska legislature is thinking again of perhaps having a special session under Governor Pillon to switch their electoral vote to all or nothing winner take all.
This is
a developing story as we speak.
Pennsylvania, where do you have the polling in PA right
now?
And again, not that people don't split their ticket, but this data between the KC and the McCormick campaign consistently puts KC somewhere between four and eight points up, so outside the margin of error.
Again, I mean, my mantra for years has been infrastructure, party infrastructure, campaign infrastructure, and that's the sort of stuff that tends to mitigate or limit.
split tickets, but you know, Trump will do well in the triangle in Pennsylvania, of course he
will.
So it'll be tight, but I think the edge there in terms of the organization.
And again, I mean, these states, Arizona, Pennsylvania, you know, they've had a series of bad GOP candidates and the reality is they don't want to be partisan here.
When the party leader puts their thumb on the scale of these state candidates, I mean, up to people like Kerry Lake or Mark Robinson or the complete weirdo.
from Pennsylvania's cycle back.
I mean, the magic touch is gone when it comes to influencing the down ticket infrastructure.
And I think that's on full display.
I think somebody who's willing to be fired from the Trump campaign needs to tell the boss, stay out of these things because you're calling them off.
And that's what we're dealing with.
Now, I want to go back to Nebraska.
Let's zero in on that because that could
Throw it into the house conceivably if they switch that, if everything played out according to a certain algorithm.
Talk to me.
Sure.
So this is something I'm going to get a little bit in the week.
They're not as much as I did in our constitutional amendment last week.
You got 120 seconds to pull this off, mi amigo.
Early voting for military personnel starts tomorrow in every state in the country.
So you tell me what happens.
If next week or the week after, Nebraska changes how it allocates its electoral votes.
That means a military service member who votes tomorrow as their entitlement due under federal law, their vote doesn't count as much as any other Nebraska who votes 10 days from now after that.
So I smell a 14th amendment lawsuit on the horizon.
You're darn right you're doing that.
That's called vote dilution.
Clarence Thomas would agree with me on that.
Well, if you and Clarence agree on something, we've just made radio history today, Mr. Torres, with the Pete McRoberts.
You know, I'm not surprised that the 14th Amendment angle would be brought up.
And if that's the case, man, the GOP legislature had a chance to do that earlier this year, and they whiffed, didn't they, Pete?
They could have done it yesterday.
Yeah.
And so, you know, the standoff between the governor of Nebraska and the governor of Maine is resolved.
Laws in Maine don't take effect until 90 days after they're enacted.
Fascinating.
Unless they have a two-thirds majority.
Nebraska's Unicam doesn't have that.
So they were trying to be cute by waiting until that period.
But why did they wait until 45 days?
I mean, it is absolutely clear.
So literally, tomorrow morning, an overseas military member gets to vote and mail their vote in.
And right now in Nebraska, that's one of six in a thousand votes.
or 600,000 constituents.
And if they change the law and somebody else votes, and it's now it's one of two million, yeah, that's both illusion.
You just, and that's the critical point.
Look at Nebraska, Georgia, you know, the Trump campaign smells a loss.
And this is why they're scrambling at the last minute to literally change the rules or in some cases statues.
Pete, Pete, could we say, could we say, Pete McRoberts, that Nebraska choked in overtime?
Oh, wait, that already happened.
All
the love and grace,
Mrs. Jacobson.
When I go home, she's going to say sleeping bag, front porch, because her beloved Huskers lost, and she doesn't want me to rub it in, but she will rub it in when the Hawkeyes keep struggling on offense.
Pete McRoberts, always great to have you on the show.
We're going to keep you plugged in all the way, maybe even on election night itself, our life coverage, if you'll have us.
Oh, sure I will, because I won't have anything else to do on Iowa on that night.
Well, I thought you'd be there advising the Bidens or the Harris campaigns, but if you can get away from the White House to talk to someone's cell phone, we'd appreciate it.
Pete McRoberts, JD, one of the finest lobbyists and citizen advocates that you'll see out there.
My brother from another mother, even though we are on different sides of the aisle, we're like asymptotes to use that.
geometric progression.
Pete, we're paralleling each other on other sides of the line, so to speak.
Well, thank you, John.
It's always a pleasure.
And I'm always here for your listeners after you.
Well, your math is astonishingly good.
So we're going to keep watching this.
We're still in eternity in politics.
Jimmy Carter was up about 10 points more.
at this point in time than he was six weeks later so we will see what happens.
Pete McRoberts studio audience on their feet as Henry Mancini takes us out.
John Jacobson here and you're listening to the Jacobson
Report sponsored by Jim and Cindy Jandron Midwest renewable energy LLC ethanol renewable fuels energy for a strong America is lean is clean and it's green out in eastern Nebraska and Also sponsored by life runners go to life runners org Protecting life from womb to tomb helping expectant mothers along the way.
Let's pick up part two
Tonight we're taking another look at the presidential race as we cascade toward early November, but early voting is starting.
So actually the election is beginning almost as we speak.
We're bringing back by popular demand Sheila Murphy, one of the Midwest's top GOP political consultants, particularly in the Nebraska and Iowa area.
great successes in winning campaigns.
She's also got some scoop on this Nebraska second district because there is one electoral vote in play there.
Like Maine, Nebraska is not winner take all in the electoral votes.
And right now I have Nebraska two going to Harris as opposed to Trump.
Sheila, let's look at the electoral college math right now.
The Democrats are feeling their oats.
The Democrats I'm talking to are telling me Harris has got this.
The Trump campaign is reeling.
Particularly in North Carolina now North Carolina is in play, but Sheila I'm doing a little bit of research I'm hearing a few things and I think there's some internal pulling that looks very good for Donald Trump particularly in the Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin
Virginia, surprisingly, seems to be far more robust for the Trump campaign.
Maybe even with the stub of the toe in North Carolina, this thing is salvageable.
Rasmussen polling, which is not state by state, he's had Trump up, I think, by five over Harris.
What to believe?
And Sheila, in talking with some Democrat friends, I emphasized them.
Trump's support was very much underpulled in the 2016 and 2020 polling.
He outperformed his polls easily by four or 5%.
If you apply that to this cycle, Trump's gonna sweep the table and win.
It'll be like an inside straight.
My Democrat friends say, no, we're polling better now, so we can gauge the silent Trumpers that we couldn't gauge a while back.
Put this all in perspective.
You were just at a huge,
Essentially, de facto Republican gathering Saturday night at Steve Shuffler's event.
But Sheila, even before that event at Shuffler's, you had a take on where you thought the race was.
Tell me what that take was as of Saturday.
As of Saturday, I believe Trump has a narrow lead.
I see still.
so much dissatisfaction among the people out there, and I am wary of anything I hear from any Democrat activist.
First of all, that party is based upon, get a message, tell it, doesn't matter if it's true or not, just keep pushing it.
That's what they're pushing, that's how they're people.
We've got it in the bag, keep pushing it.
They're trying to discourage Trump people from showing up at the polls.
I think
that's true.
I think that's absolutely.
They're trying to depress turnout with the psychological war games.
There's no question about that.
Trying to make everybody think it's over and it's far from over.
And I think that they think that because Kamala, excuse me, I don't want to mispronounce it, go to prison or anything.
I think that Kamala...
is they did not fall down on her face on the debate, so they're calling that a victory.
But actually, I think a lot of people were so put off by the fact that she was obviously prepared with memorization that it didn't have the impact that they think their victory could have and should have.
And I don't think it made a ripple in what people believe.
Well, Sheila, here's the thing.
I think what's interesting, correct me if I'm wrong here, but there was some instant analysis of the debate, and many thought Harris did well, but as things unfolded and as it was pointed out that ABC erroneously misled their viewers on the fact checking, which literally wasn't fact checking,
The ABC was wrong with their fact checks, altering the course of the debate, interrupting Trump, not doing the quid pro quo fact checking on Harris.
It looked very suspicious such that David Muir's ABC News Tonight ratings have gone in the tank since the debate.
Talk to me sis.
As well, they should.
I think I mentioned to you last time my belief that David did not show up to moderated debate.
He showed up to prepare an audition tape to be processed for what he hopes will be present in Harris.
That's really all it was for them.
They made no effort for objectivity.
But I think people have to realize one important fact.
Journalism today is not what it was.
We have here several professional generations.
of people that have come through journalism believing that their allegiance is not through the truth or the fact.
Their allegiance is to a liberal agenda that they believe to be more beneficial for mankind.
They have been taught all through their education.
Every job they've had, every boss, every mentor has told them, your job is to find a way to do what's best for the greater good.
And so they don't even think they did anything wrong.
That's what everybody has to realize.
We have a very basic problem in the communication of what used to be journalism.
And I don't think anything I've seen exemplified it better than the behavior of those two people on that fake stage.
And I believe if you ask them, they still say, oh, we did exactly what our job is.
Sheila
Murphy
here.
Sheila Murphy here with this GOP political consultant.
Sheila, I'm going to touch on a subject because I'm old enough to live through 1968 and remember it well.
We have a toxic political environment right now.
There is an air of almost vitriolic hatred, almost violence inciting.
going on out there.
We've seen that we can quantify two attempts on the life of President Trump, rumors of one in, I believe, New York, which turned out not to be a case, but in, I believe it was in the Southwest the other night, there were
People at the entrance of the Trump rally that had what appeared to be chemical burns, they were hospitalized in the ER.
Sheila is an old trick of Marxist, Bolsheviks, Maoists to demonize their opponents and essentially incite violence against them, sometimes carry it out.
We know what happened to Trotsky in Mexico when he ran afoul of the Londonist successor purists.
there in Soviet Russia after the revolution there.
Sheila, it's interesting.
The political violence today seems to be emanating from the left, not from the right, even though the right is often accused of being the ones that use the incendiary speech.
Talk about this.
That is absolutely correct.
It is emanating from the left.
And it all goes back to their brilliant switchover from standard morality, classic morality that we all have known to situational ethics, which is what they practice top to bottom in the Democrat Party today.
In other words, what you do does not matter.
The goal only matters.
Anything that you do to achieve the goal is acceptable.
Once a large group of people accept that premise and the Democrat Party has, I'm sorry to say,
at noble parts, because anything you do to achieve the goal is okay.
So if somebody tries to kill Trump, well, they're trying to get rid of an evil entity, so it's all right.
Well,
Sheila, this is what's terrifying.
What's terrifying to me is that polling showed that half of the Democrats polled thought the country would have been better off
had it been the demise of President Trump.
This is astonishing that half of the adherence of a political party would basically wish for the physical demise of their opponent.
This is uncharted territory for us.
Yes, yes it is for this country.
The world has seen it before.
But this is the beginning of a society that absolutely has lost its moral compass.
The moral absolutes are what keeps the train on the track.
And we're losing the moral absolutes.
The fact that
lying is always bad.
Now, lying can be good if you're going to achieve the right goal.
Killing is always bad.
No, not if it's going to take us to the right place.
This is what we're seeing.
I don't think people understand how serious this basic switchover on morality is.
And I agree with you.
It's terrifying.
Here with Sheila Murphy, top GOP political strategist consultant.
Sheila, we've got two minutes left.
Let's do the math.
How does Trump get to 270?
What's his path?
Well, I think his path strategically is what he's doing.
He's one of the better direct communicators that politics is.
He has a way of connecting directly with people.
He's not able to do it as well through mass media.
And he definitely doesn't have the ability to connect with people through news reports.
So he's really left only with getting out there.
and reaching the people.
People feel connected to him and if he can keep doing that and these assassination attempts are to discourage him from appearing in front of large groups.
at the risk of his life, but you can't yield to that fear because this is his past victory.
In full disclosure, Sheila, you ran my successful campaigns, did a brilliant job doing it, and I remember once when they wanted to hang me in effigy, and I said, why not just hang me on council bluffs?
Why hang me in effigy?
Just come to me in council bluffs and hang me there.
What say you?
Yes, I say that's when you better joke.
But, you know, but it's...
It's true, and you were similar very much, I believe, in Trump, in that your key, your campaign, was very much a hands-on.
You wanted to shake hands with as many of your constituents, meet them face to face as possible.
We took you all over the place, and it was very much on a lesser scale, a Trump strategy.
Meet the people, talk to the people, and let the people know that you understand that they're hurting, and that you...
Don't just want to give them platitudes.
You want to give them solutions.
That's his path, plain and simple.
Well, Sheila, one thing that I have in common with President Trump is we both think the world of loving, gracious Deborah Jacobson.
And you know, I think that her putting up with me all these years has even convinced some of my Protestant friends that purgatory does exist.
Yes, I think some of us are walking through that.
But I think back to your campaign.
There was a Trump parade, just 100 vehicles, all with Trump signs and things, and you were standing on the parade route in front of a billboard that we had made for
you,
holding up a sign that said, I'm the Johnals.
That was a high point for
me.
Well, I thought when we did the commercial singing in the rain, when we were dancing in the rain, that was pretty good, too, with a little help from Gene Kelly.
Sheila, here's the outro question.
The election's held today.
Who wins?
Give me an electoral vote count that you give to the winner.
Oh, boy, I can't tell you the exact count that I say Trump wins by more electoral votes than people think.
I think that a lot of what we think is a never-cratchest smoke, and I think Trump's got the fire.
So I think a convincing electoral college victories for Trump.
Fascinating, guys.
Sheila Murphy.
Sheila, the studio audience is on their feet.
Thanks again for joining us.
We will talk to you in a week.
Well, thank you, John.
Thank you for having me.
John Jacobson here on this beautiful Saturday, autumnal Saturday in Iowa, here with
The great Barbara Hames Bryant, the matriarch of this beautiful multi-generational civic steward family of faith that provides safe, beautiful, affordable homes to all in our community.
Just go to their website, HamesHomes.com to see how easy home ownership can be.
But Barbara, you've got comfort, beauty and value there, financing options, safe communities.
spacious and attractive manufactured home communities out there at Summit View and Grand View.
What's new is the beautiful vernal equinox has passed and we are now into the autumnal equinox, beautiful evenings and people still with the beginning of school and the changes of jobs.
People are looking for homes and boy, do you serve up a great option for folks?
Talk to you.
I just love Iowa fall evenings and let me tell you about what's going on this weekend, please September 28th and 29th.
It's the parade of homes and Cedar Rapids and one of our beautiful new double sectionals on Luke Street Southwest will be open on Saturday and Sunday for people to come through and view the spaciousness and the attractiveness and all the amenities
of a beautiful manufactured home.
I sure hope folks will come out and see this parade of homes in the past.
Manufactured homes have not been allowed to be part of the greater Cedar Rapids home builders' parade of homes because they weren't considered real homes.
Well, even the Cedar Rapids home builders have realized how beautiful these double-sectional homes are, and now they're included with all the other new homes.
as far as homes you can visit and tour during the parade of homes.
This is so important, the embrace in the community.
This is worth a re-erring even into October, Barbara, because people need to understand this.
Barbara, the reason you're now invited with open arms is the magnificent progress manufactured homes have had in these past generation, due large in part to the efforts of your father and mother.
They are safer, they're more aesthetic.
They're more beautiful, they're more affordable than ever.
They have the look and feel just as bit, if not higher quality, when it comes to derechoes than regular site-built homes, Barbara.
John, can you believe it?
In October of this year, Haynes Homes will have been in business for 55 years.
We started business in 1969.
And I had a chance this week at our Iowa Manufactured Housing Association to talk to other retailers in the area.
And I said, tell me, what is the biggest change that has happened in 55 years?
And every one of them said, the homes.
They used to be thin walls, metal ceilings, kind of a flimsy construction.
And now they're built with the same building materials as site-built homes.
the walls are just as thick, the roofs are single roofs, and they are tied down so well, as you pointed out, that they were stood the derecho of 2020 magnificently.
Indeed, and industry leaders such as your father and mother, the late great Kurt and Norma Hames, they pushed for this quality.
They did not cut corners.
They take care of their people.
They have this great patriotic
Christian faith-based and civic commitment.
And Barbara, that speaks so well for your ongoing efforts there.
You have beautiful landscaping.
You have safe communities.
You have food pantries, dog parks, Frisbee, golf.
What don't you do to improve the quality of living there with the beautiful roadways and your access to all of the great burgeoning retail in Southwest Cedar Rapids, not far from the airport?
Well, if you want to know what we don't have, I'm sorry to say we don't have a golf course.
And we don't have a lake, like some of the communities in Florida do.
But
other than that, we've got everything anybody would ever need.
Right, Barbara.
And how easy is it for folks
to come down there to talk to Curtis, to talk to Troy, to talk to you, to begin this process of investigating purchasing one of these beautiful manufactured homes.
Hames the Homes people is open seven days a week at the corner of Wilson Avenue and West Post Road Southwest in Cedar Rapids.
So that's Wilson Avenue, West Post Road, seven days a week.
The best way to reach us is online at our website, ameshomes.com and we still have our Mary and I will phone number that legacy phone number, 319-377-4863.
We would love to talk to anybody who'd like to learn more information
It's about today's modern, beautiful, spacious, manufactured housing.
Always a joy to talk with Barbara Hamas Bryant.
Barbara, I'm teaching five classes as a visiting professor.
in a free market, great free market business college, Ottawa University, just outside of the Kansas City Metro.
And Barbara, I tell my kids about the people that are volunteering this election cycle.
People like you that are such good leaders in our state and community stewards.
And I remind my kids in class that I remember vividly for the first time my
first election of real good memory, which was the 68 election, right at the time that your dad and mom were about to embark upon their great civic establishment.
And Barbara, the Vietnam War was at its apex then.
Your father and mother were great World War II veterans.
They've never forgot our missing in action in Vietnam, have they?
No, and I think it's worth mentioning that in 1968, we actually lived in Bangkok, Thailand.
My dad was working for the Kingdom of Thailand as a military advisor, training the Thai troops against the Viet Cong.
So we have a very long history of supporting America and American ideals.
and we fly the MIA flag as you're well aware you
do at
both of our communities every day and it says you are not forgotten
it is a beautiful
wonderful sentiment.
And yes, for those of you that are Rodgers and Hammerstein fans, the King and I and Anna and the King, Kurt Hames truly was the advisor to the King of Siam.
He probably didn't sing like Deborah Carr, but I bet he was even more influential, Barbara.
I think that the King of Thailand took his advice very seriously.
Well, and Barbara, I'll tell you what's amazing is
I have many international students in my business college, some from Europe, some from Central Latin and South America.
Many of them come from dictatorial regimes that do not value free speech, that do not value free market economics.
They hunger for that here.
And they're hoping that we still stay true to our beacon of freedom, Barbara.
I hope we all do that this November and take very seriously our
role as custodians of, as Ben Franklin said, a republic, ma'am, if you can keep it.
That was a quote, and I think it is true today as it was then.
I think folks need to remember that the government does not exist to protect our income.
It does not exist to protect our roads.
The government does not exist to protect our health.
The government exists to protect our rights.
And that's it.
Amen, sister.
This is why Barbara, I still think you should take a run at governor or Senate or Congress someday.
You're still a very young person in the electoral politics scheme of things while you're a couple decades younger than our president and in leading presidential candidates.
So it's always
Great to have you on the program with us.
I urge all of our listeners.
Look, we've got people that listen to radio.
They listen to the Iowa Hawkeyes.
They look for some pregame and good fodder on Saturday mornings.
Folks, if you want to be by Iowa City, whether it's kids attending there or you want to be a parent that lives in the area, Barbara, you're not far from campus, are you?
To Iowa City to Kenwick Stadium for every home game go Hawks
Absolutely, you guys are near the Cedar Rapids Airport.
You're by all of the great retail there in that area.
I I frequent to that Menards
more than I care to mention that just down the street from you guys, I found some nuts and bolts to fix my mom's walker.
As a matter of fact, all the retail you need is right there near the homes, the Hames Homes communities and Iowa city is just a hop, skip and a jump down.
Barbara will be rooting for our Hawkeyes in the meantime.
Have a great rest of the week.
Thanks for what you're doing in Des Moines to get us all prepped for voting.
And we will talk to either you,
or Curtis or Troy next week.
It's always a pleasure, John.
You take care.
The great Barbara Hames Bryant matriarch of this wonderful multi-generational Hames Homes family.
And we'll be right back in a moment.
Welcome to the Faith in Economics podcast.
I'm Dr. Justin Clark.
I'm an ARD family professor of philosophy and ethics.
With me is Russ McCullough.
the founder and director of the Gorton Institute and Peter Jacobson, the professor of economic education.
And maybe some research in there
too.
Okay, here we go.
Oh, that works.
All right, so.
That
was great, except I think you forgot my name for a
second.
All right, so we wanted to do a little bit of work here on I guess a little more of a policy issue and explaining some things with some policies going on.
So what did you have with capital gains here?
Yeah, so Kamala Harris, and this is not the first time this has been proposed, but she's the betting market favorite.
She's winning in the polls.
If the election was held today, all signs indicate she would be the president.
This may not be true.
Sometimes polls are wrong.
See 2016, but sometimes they're right.
See 2020.
And she would be the president right now and she's proposing what would be a pretty radical departure from taxes in the past.
That is, she wants there to be a minimum effective tax rate of 25% on people who have a net worth of over $100 million.
And that effective tax rate would include taxes on unrealized capital gains.
And so you would have to have a minimum tax rate of 25% of your income
and your income includes your unrealized capital gains.
Can you explain what that means for the folks at home?
Yeah, I can explain what it means for the folks.
So capital gains is, a capital gain is when you have a stock, you hold it, it goes up in value and you sell it, that's a capital gain.
Or any assets.
Yeah, or any assets.
It goes up in value, you buy for $100, you sell for $150, you have $50 of...
tax potentially on your profit so to speak
about
your capital gain
yeah and so one of the democratic talking points that has come out lately is this idea that millionaires have created this brilliant scheme to avoid paying a capital gains taxes they just don't sell their assets right and so what we have to do to fix this problem is start taxing them when you have a stock.
It goes up by, like Russ said, $50 with a millionaire.
It's going to be way more, but let's say $50.
The Democrats want you to consider that $50 to be income and then tax you on that income, even if you haven't sold, which by the way, that means, let's say you're, you know, your stocks are due, you've got some calculation to your end about your unrealized gains.
January 1st comes along the stock market tanks.
You're getting taxed on a bunch of things that are way overvalued.
So that is the realized part.
I think we kind of glossed over that.
So when you realize a gain, you've actually sold the asset and you have money in your hand, right?
You can go run to the grocery store with and do, which as you know, if you have unrealized gains, you've been holding a stock for a while.
It's raised from 100 to 150, but you didn't cash out.
You can't run to the store and buy stuff with your $50 of unrealized gains.
It's just something that you
keep track of for accounting purposes.
Yeah, so the whole reason why this idea is like from the get go pretty nonsensical.
is that, as Russ pointed out, when you have an unrealized gain, it is actually not a gain.
You can think of it as a gain, but as anybody who's been in the stock market can tell you, an unrealized gain could be a gigantic realized loss in the future.
In other words, if your stock all of a sudden plummets in value, you could lose all that unrealized gain, and then you can't get it back.
You can't go back to the past and sell the stock at the higher price.
That's not an option.
So it's not a real gain yet.
It's not real income, and you can't sell the...
It's funny, like you can sell the stock, but the point is you can't use the stock as income before you sell it, right?
There are certain things you can do with stock holdings based on quote unquote the unrealized gains.
You could borrow a loan.
So yeah, there might be some advantages to having certain assets.
But the point is this introduces all sorts of complications like.
You know, the biggest complication being, well, then do we have unrealized loss deductions?
You know, if someone buy stocks and they go down in value, do they get deducted over there?
Generally, Democrats will say, oh, yeah, of course, that would be part of it.
But as anybody who's in real estate or knows how things work in real estate will tell you, this creates a nightmare with things like depreciation, people using accounting tricks to write off taxes.
The list goes on and on.
So I thought we would talk about this.
One of the key points that I want to hit in the podcast, but we don't have to go straight to it, is one of the talking points in this conversation has been, well, it's just people who are making over $100 million.
Why are you so worried
about it?
You're
not making $100 million.
In fact, you're never going to, or it's people have a net worth.
I should, I mean, not making, but people who have a net worth of $100 million.
But they
fell into it 25%.
tax-prime marginal rate?
No, it's saying they would pay a minimum effective tax rate of 25% on all of their income, including the unrealized gains.
Yeah.
So yeah, we could talk about the policy.
We could talk about why you should worry about it, even if you're not 100 millionaires, because there's actually several reasons.
So yeah.
Yeah, so let me say that a wealth tax has been on the docket for a while, and this is a little different.
Like a wealth tax would include the assets.
In my example of you own something that's worth 100, it rises to 150.
The whole 150, assuming they're not dead against it, is part of your wealth.
And
so that's been brought up in the past of having a wealth tax, which makes no sense for a lot of the same reasons for
this.
Yeah, and I'd say stay for the record.
I think what Russ has talked about is much worse.
A wealth tax would be much scarier than a non-realized gains.
Yes.
But he's right.
There's some similar accounting and difficulty.
Sorry, continue Russ.
No, that's
my
part.
I
just wanted to...
Say that that's been brought up, there's lots of good reasons, counting and theory and incentives that we've avoided a wealth tax all of these years in the United States.
And I mean, the bottom line is if the politicians can't figure out how to raise enough taxes with income,
What's the problem?
I mean, it's the more simple we make the tax code, the easier it would be to get things right.
So granted, I know the sentiment there of, well, they've got a tax rich, they're not paying their fair share, blah, blah, blah.
But they also fall into these high income categories.
And so adjustments can be made that way, even if they are holding onto it, which is what they're trying to avoid.
So
yeah, I think this is just their way to end run.
The general
opposition to a wealth tax because Peter has brought up and I think he'll talk a little bit more about why people who are less than 100 million dollars or whatever, they ought to be worried about this too, even though it technically doesn't apply to them.
But I also think that if you start doing things like taxing unrealized capital gains, a wealth tax is right around the corner.
And Peter's right, it would be much worse, but this is such a dramatic
step from the way we normally do taxation, that once you've made this giant leap, the leap from unrealized capital gains tax to wealth tax is actually really small
compared to
this kind of leap.
Yeah.
And I actually want to expand on that and explain I think why, because I think Justin's absolutely right.
And so right now, the way our tax system is set up with respect to realized gains and income taxes is it's very simple.
All the money that you bring in, whether it's because you sold an asset or because you earned it from your labor,
All that money is taxed at the, you know, whatever rates associated with it.
So it's only income, really, that's being taxed in both cases.
You don't have to do any clever tricks to know if you bought a stock for 100 and you sold it for 150, you gain $50, right?
There's no accounting tricks there.
It's subtraction.
That's the accounting trick.
But when you start asking like unrealized gains, oh, well, we actually have lots of assets.
Some of them aren't on the stock market.
How are we going to figure out the unrealized gains on, you know, like fancy paintings?
This is like an interesting little category that people can store their wealth in or collect your cars or things like this or real estate.
And so, yeah, real estate is another we have a little on real estate already because of property taxes.
But still, like we're taking the assessment thing and we're applying it to all areas.
Yeah.
Once we start assessing every single asset for its unrealized gains.
then it's going to be really easy to just assess every asset and tax the wealth itself, right?
We will build accounting techniques, which will not be representative of reality, but the government will be happy enough with them that they could say, oh, well, now it's really easy to tax the wealth on the paintings.
We already have this technique for assessing their value, so we can just use that technique, right?
So it's building up the framework of the wealth tax.
I have not even considered that, but Justin's absolutely right.
Yeah.
And what the government's doing in theory is accelerating the collection of taxes.
So if you go back to my...
example of 100 to 150, and then let's say it goes another year up to 200.
Well, now we have $100 worth of gain.
If you sold it at that time, you'd pay tax on the full 100, where it went from 100 to 200, right?
But that's at the end of year two.
And so by doing this little trick of theirs, the unrealized part is 150, they've collected the tax off the 50, and then the next year they got another 50.
All they're doing is kind of attempting to accelerate
move that tax ahead in the time frame.
Yeah, and I even wonder, now that you've said it, and I haven't even looked at it, I wonder if there is a removal of the realized gains tax for the same asset.
So in other words, when you sell it, do you pay a lower tax because you've already paid the unrealized gains tax?
Oh, you would.
Yeah, I mean, I would hope so.
I'd hope so,
but it's not as obvious as maybe you think with our company.
I know enough to be dangerous with these sorts of issues.
And there
basis and other things that occur with that.
So yeah, they really would just be excited.
But a stroke of a pen from somebody and wipe it out or something, I don't
know.
But I mean, where I think this...
there's lots of reasons to be concerned about this even if you're not a multi-millionaire but i want to lay out the first two which i think are maybe worth talking about but have a little less info on the first reason is just if things are morally wrong like they should be accepted even if it isn't happening to you right this is obvious like kindergarten morality but like we can apply that to so when someone says why do you care about this it's you you're not a hundred millionaire it's like
Yeah, I'm not.
But like, if it's inappropriate for us to do this, then it shouldn't matter the wealth threshold.
You care about slavery.
Yeah, it's like, hey, you wouldn't have been enslaved.
It's like, yeah, that's right.
But I still am upset about it, right?
So that's the first reason.
The second reason is this is going to have all sort of weird incentive effects on like, you know, certain assets that you might hold that are harder to track their unrealized gains versus, you know, stock assets.
And then if people are pulling their money out of the stock market on the margin, that's hurting other people in 401ks.
That that's a big conversation, too.
The third reason which I think is important is that these taxes always start as targeted to a small number of really rich people.
And the fun thing is they always trickle their way down to the middle class eventually.
I
have a fourth one.
It's terrible for founders.
It removes founders from the economy in a very clear way, I think.
So who wants to jump on morality?
I don't know, Peter, do you want to kick that off or do we go to our font?
I think maybe that's our one that I don't have too much extra day.
We could argue about whether or not it's moral, but if it is immoral, then you should be against it either way, right?
And if you don't think it is, then that's not a reason.
Well, I think
just a little bit of time on the morality.
I mean, just not maybe much more than a minute, but the idea of freedom and property rights.
It was my labor that generated that income, and I own that asset.
And so, I don't know, Justin, can you help me out?
I mean, to me, I guess a judgment call may be on the morality, but if you believe in personal freedom and property rights, then it would be...
More immoral than the income tax that we're just adding on another layer
of immorality, maybe.
Yeah, I mean we could do an entire podcast on the proportion of taxes that the wealthy pay in this country and the idea that the super wealthy...
aren't paying the vast majority of taxes is, I think, wrong.
Yeah,
the bottom 50% pay 3% of our taxes.
Yeah, so this idea that the super wealthy, they actually have an additional obligation in addition to their already increased obligation.
Yeah, and you're right.
Most people don't when you, if you press them on, yeah, tax are rich, and what do you think would be the best tax rate for them?
They have no idea that they already pay 39% in that top tax bracket or 39.5, and then also, well, that doesn't include state, depending on what state they're in.
Or like what it would do to take all of
basis as well, what that would actually...
Yeah.
Like how much would that make a dent
in,
right?
When we're
running a $1 trillion deficit, yeah.
We got a billionaire.
So all right.
So he throws in a billionaire or whatever.
So a couple billion.
Doesn't make much of a dent.
All right.
So that would take the ethical thing.
It seems like this is more designed to punish.
Rather
than
to raise money and so that's one point to they said that's a good That's a good point.
I hadn't
really thought of but yeah,
maybe a little
as you
pointed out like there are easier ways to raise money than this the obvious Point of this seems to be to go after people and it goes after people and I'm asymmetrically so that seems like
Alright, so number two is the weird incentives.
I think you'd be best to describe that risk because I think you understand financial assets spending better than anyone here I could probably come up with some examples, but
well, I think you were onto one there that if if I'm able to hide the Gain a little better in let's say real estate or something because you own a property for a while We have the assessed values, but the as probably most listeners know the assessed values can be off from the market value.
So you're
If you went to go sell it today, that's the number you're really looking for is what the market value is.
Stock market, open up the Wall Street Journal or pull open an app and you've got the value on January 31st or December 31st, I should say.
So that one's easy to do and I'm sure that's mostly what is on the mind of the politician.
But where Peter was going was that if it is easier in other assets to not face this pretty significant tax,
then we move out of the stock market and into those things, raising prices of those assets and lowering prices of the other.
And so that causes stock market prices to fall at the margin.
If we have a large sums of money being pulled out of there, who gets hurt?
Well, it's your retirement funds listeners.
If you've got a 401k.
And there ends up being a significant impact of some downward pressure on the value of mutual funds and other stocks and bonds in the market, then your retirement fund is still getting hurt by this incentive in kind of a weird way.
Yeah.
I mean, imagine like the United States would somehow have to be able to not have this be a problem.
Would somehow to be able to have to assess like how accurate, for example, international valuations of certain assets are.
If I buy a bunch of lands in, I don't know, what's an Eastern European country I can go off of besides Ukraine, which does not have a great real estate.
Uzbekistan, right?
If I buy a bunch of land in Uzbekistan, and then let's say that Uzbekistan has some corruption problems, and I can bribe the county assessor to knock the valuation of my land down by 10% and offset an unrealized gain that I have in the US, well, then I've just
tax accounted myself into wealth.
And then I can sell the thing for the high price because the whole value assessment was a lie anyways.
Like there are so many different ways that this sort of game could be played.
Or man, I had that $20 million painting, but it burned in a fire.
Just like unrealized loss,
right?
The other one that's been talked about, this was back in the 70s.
I can't remember the name of the guy that kind of coined this was a land tax.
So to avoid the substitution and be able to pick up Georgia.
Yeah.
Yeah.
was to have land.
Since it's immobile and people still want it, then we could tax land and we wouldn't have some of these substitution issues.
And I think he argued
like that should be our only tax land tax so
yeah
i just had to throw that out there kind of related a little bit to the wealth stuff
yeah so like listen you already hear people on the left complain that like these millionaires and billionaires have all these tax loopholes like this is going to create so many tax loopholes which ultimately will involve
wealthy people taking their assets out of accessible assets that the normal person can buy, like in the stock market, and putting them into these niche tax shelter assets that the average Joe doesn't have access to, thus hurting the 401k value of the average Joe, by the way.
Money going under the table too.
Yeah, exactly.
You know, in black market, or attorneys and accountants enjoying this because they got a lot more work to do and they're getting rich, so they might be lobbying for it.
And you reminded me, and for the record, another thing this is going to lead to is the one thing that the
the left is always screeching about that never happens in real life, which is wealth hoarding.
Because on the margin, it is going to make way more sense for you to hold literal cash in a vault if you've got an unrealized tax on assets.
uh, than otherwise than it is right now.
And it's funny because people say they have hoard wealth.
Well, billionaires, millionaires don't hoard wealth.
They put it in the stock market and it gets put to work.
But if you start charging on these unrealized gains, you're going to hold dollar bills.
Then you're literally, you're literally hoarding wealth then.
And then actually like the Keynesian story about what happens actually starts to get a little bit scary.
Like, yeah, maybe we are going to have, you know, dollars under their mattress.
Yeah.
Bitcoin starts to look pretty attractive maybe at that point.
If you have your Bitcoin off of an exchange, you know, Coinbase will report your unrealized gains.
Yeah.
But that's, yeah.
That will wallet, which will be another podcast.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So that, and you can think of like a million things for that category, a million little distortions that lead to the average Joe having worse finance.
It would
be a major disruption of the rule of law that we, you know, try to pride ourselves.
It's
been getting shakier and shakier that.
If you make an investment for retirement, your 20-year time prize in 30 years, you know, the way the law is today is the way it should be reasonably looking like 20 years from now or 30 years from now.
And so the United States has been built on that, and that would be definitely throwing that up the window.
Honestly, I'm not sure she would have much legs in getting this through.
Yeah, for the record.
You know, politicians talk about stuff.
Her proposing it's not the same as it is it passing.
I like to believe a Republican controlled house, which I think is the projection still right now, would stop this from happening.
I will say if you offer them like, you know, $4 towards immigration officers, maybe the Republicans would cave here because they're pretty terrible at their job.
But in theory, this is totally blockable in all normal environments.
The last one and the last reason you should worry is that this I willing to bet people on this.
If this policy passed in the first four years of the Kamala Harris administration, by the time I retire, assuming I live to retirement age, my 401k will be taxed in terms of unrealized gains.
I'm willing to make that bet.
Yes, it will start at 100 million.
I have no doubts about that.
But we can talk about another little tax in the United States of America called the Income Tax.
It started in 1913.
And if you're making between zero and twenty thousand dollars which is equivalent to about six hundred and fifty thousand dollars right now your income tax rate was one percent when the when the income taxes passed and there was a two to three thousand deduction depend or three three to four.
depending on if you were single or married.
And that covered everybody up to about $96,000.
So if you were making less than $96,000 in today's dollars, you were paying a zero in income tax.
And actually the median person in the United States of America for the first four years of the income tax paid zero.
That's it's even worse than that or better than that.
Really.
It was the median filer in the United States.
So the people who didn't even bother filing because they weren't making it near enough money, like those people are included.
The median filer was making less than $3,000 a year and those people paid zero.
Now, 1917 comes around and World War One starts to become something that we need to finance.
And so they start talking about a change.
And what did they do?
They knocked the deduction down.
They knocked it down by $2,000 a piece.
So we filter all basically everybody except if you're making less than at the time it would have been like.
$30,000.
So up to $30,000, you're still not paying income taxes, but after that you are.
And now, assuming you don't have kids or anything like that, pretty much if you're making 30 plus, you're paying income taxes, right?
Income taxes have moved from something that only 1% of Americans paid, and that 1% of Americans were usually only paying 1%.
It was such a small portion of the population, a small, very rich portion of the population.
was paying the income tax and that's why the states ratified it because it's like, oh, that's a very, you know, a high number and my constituents aren't going to be mad at that.
So all these states ratified it to today where it's true that the rich still bear most of the burden, but the burden on the middle class for the middle tech or the middle class for the income tax is significant now.
Yeah.
Like your life would be noticeably better as a middle class person if you had the same effective income tax rates as you did in 1913.
The point being,
this can start as high as it want.
You could start with Jeff Bezos.
You
billionaires.
Oh, this tax is only for billionaires.
Once the tax passes, it becomes very easy to politically to modify the rates.
Yeah.
And that's the ball game.
And so once they say 100 million, they could say, well, listen, 100 million is so high, like 1 million.
If you're a millionaire, you know, we really probably should be able to tax you.
And it's like that.
Yeah, sure.
That on paper, I'm not a millionaire.
But then you realize,
Most people by the end of their lives are a large group of people by the end of their lives if they own a house and they have a decent 401k.
They actually get to the million range, especially if you're east coast, west coast.
And from there, it just goes too well.
Man, we've got this war that we need to fund and it's a million right now.
Let's knock it down to 500,000.
And before you know it, you've got like the average 50 year olds going to be paying these unrealized gains.
It's not a stretch.
It's what happens every time historically.
It is always we're going to start this little tax.
It's just going to be the super rich.
Don't worry about it.
Why are you so mad about it?
Please stop talking about it.
It's always how it starts, and then it moves to, yeah, we probably should, you know, tax this child's lemonade stand.
I think the value of
at least, because now at noon time, there's more traffic.
Like, there's always how it goes.
That's the story.
You could keep the ceiling at 100 million, and if you keep inflation
going.
That's true.
Anyway.
Yeah, that's also true.
Yeah.
Tax the quadrillionaires.
Yeah,
that's true.
That's
awesome.
I want to duplicate things with the inflation tax here.
Oh, man.
All right, Justin, you have wild card
number four.
I think that the American economy thrives on entrepreneurship and it thrives on entrepreneurs taking risks and the way entrepreneurs get paid oftentimes is inequity and if you own
If you have a high equity stake in the company that you started, and it's doing very well, and you are operating on a pretty thin profit margin, this is the reason people work for startups in Silicon Valley.
Just give me the equity, because I think it's going to be worth something.
If that equity gets valued, or if your company is doing well and that equity goes way up, now all of a sudden you have to pay taxes on that equity,
even though you
haven't even paid a
single dollar.
And you don't have cash in hand to do it.
You have to sell some of your stock to do it.
You mentioned there are ways you could borrow against it, but loans are denominated in dollars, so you are now on the hook with dollars.
Rather than just being on the hook like my equity went down or whatever and so what this results in is it becomes very hard for founders to keep control of their company.
Yeah, they
get bigger.
Yeah, that's that's actually it
become something where you might actually get the consolidation of wealth.
Because what's going to happen is these founders are going to have to market to people who have a lot of capital, right?
And so these big capitalists are going to get the bite of the new startups.
Every startup is owned 60% by state-street and these giant firms where they pack your... I mean, one of the things we saw during COVID where people said, like, why are all these private companies making these dumb decisions?
And it's like, well, all their board members are making dumb decisions.
And sometimes it takes like rogue founder capitalist to stand up and say like, I'm not doing it.
This is my company and I'm not doing this.
And when
you have, when you've made the progression from startup innovator to founder who still has control of this company, when you've, or her company, Justin, correct.
If you've made that path extremely difficult to traverse, you're just going to have, I think, a less dynamic economy.
Yeah,
wow.
Well, I might end this here with one quote that you made me think of, and it was one that pertained to real estate and to farmers, I think originally, is that,
Farmers can be paper rich and cash poor.
So if you own the land with no debt, you might have two million dollars worth of land.
But with the price of crops and what you have to do with operating expenses, you might be scratching by with 60,000 a year or whatever, you know, making some money.
And so you're paper rich and cash poor.
And these are the people that would be really negatively affected by this type of change.
All right.
Well, this has been a production of the Gorton Institute here at Ottawa University.
I'd like to thank you all for listening.
Always thanks to Dr. Jeff Stein, the czar of all things at KXEL.
Always a pleasure to be with you on behalf of Mike Sheen and me.
Thanks as always to Barbara Hames, Hames, the Homes People, and Jim and Cindy Jandran at Midwest Renewable Energy LLC and Life Runners.
People across the country running for life, protecting
the right to life from womb to tomb.
John Jacobson saying catch our podcast on kxl.com slash jacobson j-a-c-o-b-s-e-n on 1540 100.5 until next week be safe be smart be good be strong love Jesus Christ thank him and love him and God bless us everyone enjoy summer in Iowa it's great to be a Hawkeye
and Panther, and Bulldog, and Cyclone.
Till we meet again, bye bye!
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