Transcript
KXEL Presents: The Jacobsen Group Podcast – February 28, 2026
The Jacobsen Group with Jon Jacobsen · Fri Mar 6, 2026
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Economics is the study of human choice in the world we live.
Faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.
By investigating faith in economics, we can learn how they lead to human flourishing.
This is the Faith in Economics podcast, a presentation of the Gortney Institute at Ottawa University.
Welcome to our show today.
My name is Peter Jacobson.
I'm the Gortney Professor of Economic Education and Research.
Joining us today, we have Dr. Russ McCullough, the Wayne Angel Chair of Economics and founder of the Gortney Institute here at Ottawa University.
We also have Dr. Justin Clark, the Minority Family Professor of Philosophy and Ethics.
Okay well it's uh tax time and even by the time this airs you know we're still in the midst of it you should have gotten some forms from your employers by now and uh maybe you're starting to make appointments with your tax people my guy Bregujan Lee we don't ever set up until like April 13th we start like oh maybe we should set up an appointment with Jason and then
Sometimes he can do it, but if we haven't paid enough, then we have to do an extension.
So it's usually not a fun time of year.
People spending hours doing tax returns.
Part of the reason that, you know, I used to advocate against a national sales tax, or for a national sales tax.
And that would get rid of the income tax.
And I think the world would be a better place for that.
And part of it was all the hours and dedication and dollars that go into income tax preparation.
Whereas if you just paid it at the cash register,
Wouldn't life be a little simpler?
So that was called the fair tax, which is pretty much all but dead, I think, at this point.
So somehow that's a long segue of Peter about to get into a topic on income tax preparation and some issues related to it.
So I just thought I'd tee it up with, why do we have to go through this?
But we all do.
Peter, what do you got?
Yeah.
So income taxes and specifically the salt deduction were on my mind recently because we have a lot of rumblings out of New York.
by current mayor of New York City, Mom Dami, who has been kind of rattling the cage to get the able to increase income taxes of his own volition.
But he's putting pressure on the governor of New York to do that.
And that the leverage that he's using is he's saying, well, if we don't get higher income taxes, then we're going to have to increase property taxes in New York City.
New York City already has outrageous property taxes.
This would disproportionately hurt middle-class people.
And so this is kind of a pressure point that Mamdami is using in order to convince the state governments to allow for higher income taxes, which apparently in New York he needs the state government sign off.
He can't have his own income tax at the city level.
And so the the reason why I think this is valuable to talk about is that mom Dami would want state income taxes to be such that the average person in New York City or the average rich person rather New York City is paying like double what they're paying in the next highest state, which I think is New Jersey.
And the difficulty here is that, you know, New York City is running a ridiculously high budget in terms of expenditure.
They're outpacing several states at this point, including states with higher populations.
So like if you.
take the whole population of the state and compare it to New York City.
New York City is spending more money, but it has a lower population than I think it's like Florida, for example.
And so, you know, how can people get away with this?
Well, I think part of it has to do with the salt deduction, which is kind of the point of the podcast today.
The salt deduction is I think the only income tax reduction that I am opposed to.
Maybe you could construe hypothetical income tax reductions that I would also be opposed to, but I'm a big fan of anything that reduces people's taxes.
Obviously, I'm biased.
I like the child tax care or child care, whatever, credit.
I like the taxes on tip thing that Trump did with eliminating taxes on tips.
I'm generally in favor of writing off all forms of interest, mortgage interest.
So I like tax cuts.
I'm a big fan.
I mostly think the more people can get out of taxes, the better.
But I don't like salt.
And the reason why is pretty straightforward.
And I'm not the first person to point this out.
A lot of conservatives have sort of raised the alarm over the effect of the salt deduction.
So just to be clear, listeners, the salt deduction is the state and local tax deduction.
And so how it works is on your federal income taxes, if you itemize your deductions, you can write off the amounts of tax you pay to your state and local governments.
So that's the salt deduction.
And, you know, this sounds good until you think about the fact that the effect of this deduction is that it lessens the negative impact of increasing taxes at the state level for left-wing states.
And so places like California, places like New York, they're able to sort of artificially increase their taxes.
And in a way, the federal government subsidizes that by collecting less from those states where the tax rates are really low.
So it's kind of like what's happening is California and New York are taking money out of the federal income tax pool and putting it to their own like free town cars or whatever
their groceries for
everything to say.
Or free, yeah, Mondami's free grocery store, whatever.
And
Unfortunately, Trump recently has been on the wrong side of this.
And so in his first term, 2016 to 2020, he actually helps kind of usher in like a death blow for Salt.
He essentially didn't let it renew, or at least didn't allow it to continue at the pace it was.
And I was a big fan of this when he did it.
But now with, I think it's the Tax Cut and Jobs Act, you know, set the initial cap.
He, with the big, beautiful bill, recently increased the cap so you can deduct up to $40,000.
of state and local taxes from your federal taxes from 2025 to 2029.
Again, for those who itemize and obviously in order to take advantage of this, you'd have to be very wealthy probably.
Yeah, I was gonna bring that up just, I think it's less than 10% or less than 20%.
Once Trump 1.0 raised the deductions and supplied the tax code, I think it's very little people, very few people of taxpayers anyway that actually pay, that do itemize.
Yeah, that's, I mean, I know I could Google it, I haven't, but it's not a large, Justin maybe can Google it while we're talking.
Well, very
few taxpayers end up actually paying the majority of the taxes anyway.
That's correct.
That's correct.
Also, yeah, it's only 50%, the upper 50%.
But yeah, so it's very few people with the high standard deduction that wiped out a lot of.
kind of tax headache, actually, because you don't have to worry about itemizing.
Yeah, if you trust the Google AI, what I'm seeing is that 45% of taxpayers with average gross income over $200,000 to use it.
And so that's kind of the threshold where people start to use it.
And then it's about half and half compared to only 3% for those earning from the 20,000 to 50,000 range.
Yeah.
And so it's kind of exactly what you'd expect is that it tends to benefit the rich.
Right.
Your point is only further shown there that you are actually truly targeting the rich.
Yeah.
Exactly.
So it tends to only benefit the rich, which I'm not opposed to the rich having tax cuts.
I prefer to give tax cuts the middle class into the poor, but I'm not opposed to the rich having tax cuts.
But what I dislike...
is that the tax cut that's being provided by SALT to the rich is actually moving into the pocket of the states of California and New York.
And these leftist states that have taxes that would otherwise be unbearable to the citizens.
And so what this does is it creates this weird environment where New York City, because they get these huge introductions, can do all these things that they wouldn't otherwise be able to do.
And they could be like, look at what we're doing.
Our tax rate is so high.
And we're still doing great.
People are still living.
here, look at all the services we're providing, when really your effective tax rate isn't that much higher because you're just stealing from the federal government to make up for that.
It's
not
really stealing because for some reason the federal government with a red house and senate and presidency have voted themselves into subsidizing California, New York, again these huge tax states, New Jersey, and there as well.
So I see this as an all around lose.
I can't think of any good reason why it should continue.
One thing, you know, this is the Faith in Economics podcast.
If you read the Psalms, it's usually talking about the wicked and punishments.
But one of the things that the book of Psalms has with respect to consequences is that oftentimes the psalmist want like the curse that he puts on his enemies is that they just fall into their own nets.
Like that's a very common curse is that I hope that the traps and the schemes they devise come upon their own heads, which is honestly a great hope for like a wicked person.
Like you don't have to hope excess evil comes on to them.
Only that
like the machine they set up to ruin you falls on them.
That would be like the ultimate justice.
This is the exact opposite of that.
This is like allowing somebody to create this really heavy architecture that sort of aims
at benefiting themselves and with that architecture, you're then subsidizing them to say, well, look, Texas are a bunch of fools because their tax rates are low and no one's moving there from California because they're willing to pay the higher taxes.
Texas should raise taxes too if they want to act smart like we are.
But it's just not allowing justice, like the natural justice that would occur if you didn't have this policy to occur.
So
a couple technicalities that you might not even know.
Can New York
Have an income tax that's unique to Manhattan.
I don't think they can but I
don't think so either But I'm not I'm not a hundred percent sure I actually imagine the state could choose income tax the way they wanted to
so by mom Donnie doing it assuming that it has to affect everybody statewide Then again, there's kind of this distribution among funds shifting one direction or another even within New York
if they're not able to target and that's and i might point out that that's one of the beauties of the property tax so he's like complaining that he doesn't want to increase the property tax but then you're actually directly taxing the people that you're trying to use the funds for right because presumably well maybe we didn't cover that mum donnie trying to do this to like that'll help keep people in manhattan
he's only targeting the ultra wealthy and so he says like oh
We've got this unfair system where all the ultra-wealthy are living in New York City and I can't control the tax rates.
to make them pay their fair share.
And so the state needs to increase the tax rates only on the ultra wealthy, not on everybody.
So that
way the state can collect more money, distribute it to the municipalities as they do with, you know, proportionality.
And if you don't do that, and the threat is if you don't do that, I will raise taxes on everybody through increased property
tax.
And I guess the problem is if you increase the property tax, which I was saying would be good, you might be hitting the renters or you will be.
I shouldn't say might you will be hitting the renters, which then might be some of the
the class of income that he's not trying to hit.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So he's trying to figure out a way to carve out something.
Can't they just go to door to door and just extract it?
Like wouldn't Mum Donny want to do that?
Like just take their property?
Like maybe a wealth tax or something?
Go ahead.
Why would he have to?
Why would he have to?
Why aren't people volunteering to do this since it's obviously the right thing to do?
are, I listen to, you know, billionaires say, I'm a billionaire and I want to pay my fair share.
You won't believe the opportunity I have for you.
And this is also like, this is because mom Donnie has this like, what is it?
I don't know the number.
Is it five billion shortfall and is in the New York City budget or something like that?
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
5.4 billion.
Yep.
Yeah.
When he was running, he accused
Adams of lying about there being a $5 billion hole in the budget.
And then he said, you know, we can do this.
We have enough money to do the programs that I want to do.
And then completely unforeseeably, it turned out that there wasn't enough money to pay for all of his projects.
I
don't think any billion are short.
Yeah, it's shocking.
Yeah, on that, what's funny is, yeah, you're exactly right.
He's trying to address the $5 billion gap for his new projects.
The article that I read about this pointed out, there would be no shortfall at all to cover if they just spent what they spent last year, which, you know, granted, like maybe we expect some amount of increase or whatever, but
not to the tune of 5.4 billion dollars, right?
And so ultimately, mom Dami is asking for a bailout from the governor.
And ultimately, if the governor goes along with this, it's actually going to be Trump who's bailed out mom Dami in the kind of like this weird logic of salt.
And so my I think
maybe even a little bit.
This could be a populist issue.
I would think a popular comment is, I really think we should get rid of salt.
I think that all around it disadvantages, you know, the middle income as opposed to higher income in relative terms at least.
And in doing so, it actually bails out fiscally irresponsible states at the end of the day because, you know, any state that's increasing taxes, they're doing it because they've done what Mondami has done, which is they've ramped up these projects.
They spent $3 million on building bike racks or something.
They're wasting money so they need the tax revenue.
And then they just, you know, have that buck pass the federal government.
So yeah, it does.
I mean, Trump seems like he has to walk a fine line, too, because it really reeks of cronyism that he is one of the rich guys from New York.
that it, I mean, how can it not look kind of bad that I know, and he was like, oh, I like tax deductions.
Tax deductions are good kind of like how you let off with and because he's been able to take advantage of that state tax deduction for years being a person of Manhattan in New York with high income.
And
to be fair, I think salt does predate Trump.
I'm pretty sure that.
Oh, yeah.
No, it's been around for years and years.
Yeah.
But I know what you're saying that ultimately like he benefited a lot from this policy and now he's looking at, you know,
situation, New York City and all
that.
Well, Justin, you want to give us a cliffhanger of what you wanted to comment on so we can head to a break?
Yeah, I think that I agree with Peter.
And I think that some ways the argument that Peter put forward could be misconstrued as, you know, somebody could say, well, look at Peter, who's usually in favor of lowering taxes, no matter what.
He's just playing politics here because he thinks that this tax break helps people he doesn't like.
And I think that's a popular way that opposition to salt can be misconstrued.
But I really want to point out what Peter was saying was that salt, it just happens to benefit people that Peter doesn't like and he actually didn't even say he didn't like them.
What he said was that it's unfair and that these expenditures, when they happen, they have to be paid for by people.
And this moves who is paying for these policies out of the very wealthy tax bracket, who are the only people who can afford to or who will benefit from the kind of salt deduction being made.
Is that correct?
Yeah, I think another comment on that when we come back to it.
Yeah,
we'll pick up from there in just a bit.
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Okay, so we're back and Peter, you had some other things to kind of extend off of what Justin had said.
Yeah, so.
Justin, I think, is right in making the point that what I'm not saying with my opposition to salt is that it helps blue states and I don't like blue states.
Therefore, we should tax them more or something like that.
That's not what I'm saying.
What I'm saying instead is the federal government's taxes are a response to the spending that the federal government does.
That's just a matter of fact.
We outspend our tax space and so
what we have to pay in taxes is now fixed.
It's increasing, but it's fixed in the sense that we have debts that we have to pay, right?
And so what that means is there's already bills that are due.
And so when you give a deduction for salt to residents in high-tech states, California, New Jersey, New York, what you're doing is you're saying the other states are going to have a larger share in paying back the debt or deficit.
And the reason we're giving them a larger share is so that those states can spend more money themselves on these local and municipal things, which it seems to be a post to fairness.
And it's also opposed to good incentives.
I don't want it to be the case that when
mom dummy successfully if he does lobbies for new york increases income taxes i don't want the effect of that income tax increase to be blunted by the federal government i want the people who live there to feel it so they know what in reality it's happening if you cause an action that causes pain i prefer the pain go to you so that way
you know about it and you can change in future actions.
I don't like it when people are able to spread the pain to a bunch of other people who they don't have to interact with and maybe people don't even know the source of the pain, right?
That's a recipe for bad incentives and bad
outcomes.
Yeah, and basic efficiency in economics is to have
pain and hurt and help go with action, follows action, so a little more direct cause and effect so that they're bearing that and take that into account when they decide who they want to vote in office and what policies they might support her or not support.
So with the deduction, we can't forget that there's people near there that would ultimately share in all of that.
with the higher tax rates.
So wouldn't mumdonomy by raising taxes be the black eye?
Or is he thinking there'd be so much more benefits from social programs that come about from it that it would, you know, end up supporting his cause?
Yeah, well, two things.
I do think some of that pain that would be felt would fall on him.
But again, it's blunted by assault.
That's the problem is he's if he's inflicting, you know,
$10,000 of pain, salt is absorbing, $8,000.
I'm just making up numbers here, which depend on the situation, obviously.
And so, yeah, I mean, there's like, so to some extent, he'll be to blame, but one of the great things about socialist mayors in America, because they come along pretty frequently, actually, you know, mostly infrequently, but you see it every once in a while, is you occasionally get to see the experiment fail again and again.
And so when I'm done, he's doing the grocery store thing.
Kansas City had a city grocery store that
just
went under like last year.
Chicago has like played with that and it's failed.
Like this happens a lot of different times, a lot of different places.
And Margaret Thatcher I think had that quip about the problem with socialism as you run out of other people's money or whatever.
Depending on how the socialism is set up, it takes a longer or shorter amount of time to run out of other people's money.
I don't want it to be the case that when New York runs out of other people's money, then they can start taking the money out of Nebraska or Texas or Wyoming or states that don't do these weird tax policies.
Which is effectively what the self-execution
is
doing as you're pointing out.
Yeah, exactly.
Definitely on the issue of fairness does not hit well.
And I think that brings us into the idea of federalism and one of the benefits of the United States.
tend to be more of a state's rights person than our current equilibrium.
I would prefer that the federal government have less authority and the state governments have more authority.
But at least relative to other countries, the United States does a very good job of dividing power between federal and state governments.
A lot of places, the province you're in or whatever barely matters at all.
But the United States, the state that you're in actually has a pretty significant impact.
And this is another one of those cases where I dislike
Salt because what it does is it kind of standardizes taxes across the country in a certain way.
It evens and spreads out tax rates.
If you believe in the United States as like a laboratory of democracies, which is where you have all these 50 states and you've got all these different, you know, experiments going on about which policies are good and which policies are bad.
My view is we should really want very minimal federal involvement, very minimal federal taxes, because then we could look at two states.
We could look at Texas with its tax rates and California with its tax rates.
Maybe you find a state that has high property, but low income.
One state that has high income, low property.
One state that has a big sales tax, like Russ suggests.
You know, you've got all these different plans and you could see which states do the best.
You could watch people move to the states that are doing well as we kind of saw during COVID.
But salt is just a way to blanch
the impact of those experiments.
It's a way to smooth the mistakes across everybody.
And the problem is that ruins the knowledge generated by the process.
And again, it also just incentivizes continuation of bad experiments.
Yeah, I almost always want to sing a John Lennon song when it comes of imagine all imagine all the people imagine how great the United States would be if we had a small limited federal government that we wouldn't worry about.
whether it's Hillary or Trump, whether it's Biden, Kamala, or Trump, or... These elections would be so minimal if they didn't have so much power with the stroke of a pen when they came in.
Like, if we really stuck to the basic civil rights and some other things that, you know, have been established that every state needs to follow.
But then, it's like a big free-for-all for the states to set up government the way they want it set up.
And so, I just think
Milton Friedman had it right when he was questioning back how much better would it be?
The Great Depression is what kicked off kind of big government.
Government spending as a fraction of the overall economy was only 3% about roughly from 1776 to 1930.
The government federalism in its form as it was originally envisioned was working that way.
The states were really truly empowered and there was variation in the states to a greater degree.
than what we see today because of the government growing over time and basically usurping some of the differentiation that would otherwise be there, state to state.
And so I just think the world would be so much better if we weren't at federal government spending being 20%, 25%.
And I'm okay even with the 20-25% if it was back to 5% federal and 15% state.
But what's happened is the federal spending is greater than the state spending on average.
That has gone greatly away from the merits and idea of federalism.
Well, and I think to your point, Russ, if people truly believed in their ideas, everybody would welcome this.
Because then not only would you be able to run your experiment in California, but like the like-minded people in California could
to run even better experiments this way, right?
If the states had more ability to decide what their policies were, they had more freedom apart from what the federal government's telling them the limits of those are, then if you believe in like this big government socialism thing that Mom Dami's trying to do in New York City, well then you would think you would want to be able to set up that big government socialist place and show everybody how it's done.
I think the only way you could be opposed to something like more state power would be if you have a suspicion that your policies don't actually work.
and you deep down know that like we are going to have to reach into the neighboring states pockets in order to make up for the fact that uh... when i was getting campaigning my opponents and i have five billion dollars short shortfall and i lied and said i didn't and now i do have a five billion dollars right
as Justin pointed out.
So yeah, I agree with Ross.
It's not even a small government issue.
That's the amazing thing.
Everybody who believes that their policies should be successful, big or small, should be a fan of letting the states that make these decisions.
But I think some people don't believe in their policies.
And in generosity, there are probably some other reasons that people feel like we need a big federal government other than they just don't believe in their policies.
But I do think that's part of it.
I think people are secretly afraid of the impact of their own decisions.
And I know there's a bit like one of the claims would be like, well, New York City is a big city and we need to have these services.
And this is something that we want the state to provide.
And I think it's worth noting that, you know, I had a conversation with.
somebody the other day who was talking about how they're in Japan and Japan is just so much less like capitalistic than America is Tokyo has twice the population of New York City.
It has half its budget is half of New York City.
Wow.
Is it really?
Double the population.
They have almost zero homelessness and their their public services are amazing, right?
Yeah.
So even if you wanted public service, you have to look and go
it's not being provided.
There's obviously so much waste and graft in the system that even if you wanted to provide these kinds of services, there has to be a better way to do it.
Yeah.
And how much does culture play into that?
Because I think of Japan and I'm like, you know, there to me, maybe just back to the 70s and 80s, that there was always a culture of work, right?
And I think that goes back thousands of years.
You know, there's a culture of work.
you're expected to work and, you know, just whether it's following rules or how you interact with people, all of that stuff really matters.
And so, you know, to the extent that the United States got away from the culture of work, because we had a culture of work, too.
I mean, the Industrial Revolution and the migration of the settlers to the West, I mean, you name it, we have a great history of the culture of work, but
I don't think we do anymore, and I think part of it is because we're so rich.
I might say that, but a large part of it is other maybe policies that have been in place that have diminished that culture.
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birds are chirping.
We've got a great selection of new and pre-owned homes, two, three, and four-bedroom homes.
We've seen a lot more traffic in the past month of folks coming in wanting to purchase a home so that they can live in Grandview and Summitview.
Better get here before they're all sold out.
We'd love to see you.
Here with Barbara Hames Bryant, you know, Barbara, you've got that wonderful website, HamesHomes.com, H-A-M-E-S-H-O.
MES.com.
Tremendous blogging that you guys do on that website.
There's a brand new one out on the real drivers of resale value in a manufactured home.
And I think your community is there.
Do a tremendous job in exemplifying how you crank up that resale value.
I mean, condition and care.
The homes that win at resale are the homes that are maintained.
Great.
maintenance of those homes in your two communities and the community quality.
Your neighborhood is part of your investment.
Again, you guys have so many amenities from beautiful landscaping, lighting, dog parks, Frisbee, the pantry, all sorts of recreational opportunities with that nice pastoral setting yet so close to all of retail, the airport or hospitals.
Bottom line is
The Hames homeowners were able to move into larger homes, transition into the next season of life, and trade in toward their next purchase.
John, it's a sad myth that people believe that manufactured homes depreciate.
They do not.
Study after study has shown that manufactured homes and mobile homes hold their value the same as site built homes.
There's been not only studies here locally, but studies across the country that show that a home determination of the value is location.
condition and demand, location, condition and demand.
A home that's well kept will keep its value for years.
That's no different than a traditional home in a site-built neighborhood.
It's so true.
Barbara Hames here from Hames Homes.
She's this matriarch of this great multi-generational enterprise.
Of course, we've been rotating around the great Curtis Hames.
the grandson of the late great Curtis Haymes, a senior, and also Norma, the great co-foundress with Curt, these two great American veterans.
Barbara, I couldn't help but think of their service the other night when we had two great veterans born in 1926.
They would have been contemporaries, essentially, of your father and my father still with us.
What a great generation.
That was the kind of can-do spirit that first brought Kurt Norma to Eastern Iowa to start this beautiful business.
Talk about that again, this multi-generational aspect.
I'd be happy to, John.
In 1969, my parents retired from the military.
Kurt was a command sergeant major in Bangkok, Thailand, and it served for 23 years in the US Army.
Norma was a corporal.
When they first met, she was a reporter for the base newspaper, and that's how they met.
Well, Kurt was in his 40s when he retired in 1969.
He said, I'm too young to retire.
He always wanted to start his own business.
So he and Norma talked about it and decided that people are always going to need good, safe, affordable housing and decided to get into the mobile home business.
They were called mobile homes in 1969.
They
They decided to relocate to Cedar Rapids-Marion area because of the good schools, because they had three school-aged kids at the time, my brother, myself, and my sister.
And they haven't looked back.
They didn't know anything about running a mobile home business.
They didn't know anything about running a business.
But they did what they always did.
They gritted their teeth.
They learned as much as they could.
They worked as hard as they possibly could and made a successful business that is now a three-generation family business that we're proud to carry on their legacy.
And Barbara Hames Bryant, what could be a better calling, a vocation, if you would, a business calling than for three generations?
You folks at Hames, the homeless people, you've been providing comfort, beauty, and value to eastern Iowans who need beautiful, affordable, safe homes.
and you have now treated your customers right with over 13,000 manufactured homes sold since that founding year of 69.
That's a lot of homes, John.
And think about it.
Not only did we sell, you know, 13,000 homes, some of those, we sold three homes to the same family.
Every, you know, 20 years or so, they upgrade to a bigger home.
And we also love it when we have families that move in to grand deal and summit view together, because like mom will live here and she'll really like it.
And then, you know, her daughter decides that, you know, she's a single mom, she's got a kid.
Let's go be close to grandma.
And then the uncles and aunts all come and
and pretty soon we've got eight homes.
They're all related and we love it.
It's so much fun.
Well, I can't wait to come out and do some live remotes.
It is springtime live remote season.
I've been doing live remotes of late and Barbara, here's the deal.
You got two great choices there in Southwest Cedar Rapids in your two communities.
Ladies and gentlemen, highways 100, 218, 30 and 380 make the Hames communities
easily accessible to all of the Cedar Rapids, Iowa City Corridor, and Barbara, what means so much to people.
Safety and amenities, and you are stocked full with safety and amenities.
You want to talk about that for just a moment.
Yes, safety of our residents is one of our primary concerns.
We have on-call 24-7 management.
We have extra patrols from the Cedar Rapids Police Department that we pay for.
We have 50 security cameras.
We have stop signs and speed bumps everywhere.
We do everything we can to keep our residents as safe as possible.
The reason we pay for an extra patrol by the Cedar Rapids Police Department is because they normally won't patrol Grandview in some it do, because nothing ever happens.
Exactly, exactly.
So they'd rather be in...
And, you know, the parts of Cedar Rapids where there's a little more activity.
This is actually pretty quiet for them, but our residents feel safe and secure knowing that we got those extra patrols from the Cedar Rapids Police Department.
They're fine people.
They're great to work with.
They are.
And guys, this shows how dedicated the Hamas people are.
In the trust attorney business, we used to call that belt and suspenders.
It's so safe, the police normally wouldn't patrol there, but...
double down as a deterrent.
They're still there.
It's great, great love for your people.
And Barbara has even touched on in the interest of time.
But guys, they've got emergency storm shelters.
They've got abundant green spaces, recreation areas, playgrounds and community events.
Barbara, how do folks find you?
Take a drive out there.
or call you or find you on social media.
What's the best way to chase you guys down?
Give us a triple or quadruple threat here.
The easiest way to find us is online at hamshomes.com, H-A-M-E-S-H-O-M-E-S.com, where you can reach us on your phone, your tablet, your desktop also.
We're open seven days a week to show you our beautiful homes and neighborhoods.
We're at the corner of Wilson Avenue and West Post Road Southwest.
So that's Wilson Avenue, West Post Road Southwest.
All of the signs, it says Grandview Hames.
And one of our great sales specialists would love to talk to you.
Also, we have that Mirian phone number that we've had.
I love it.
I love that
legacy number.
319-377-4863.
319-377-4863.
Guys,
Barbara, you know, we love Curtis and Clint, but it's always wonderful to have you on in particular.
Barbara Hames Bryant, keep doing.
the Lord's work.
You guys have a wonderful Christian mindset in how you approach business.
I think people pick up on that.
They know you guys are genuine.
And Barbara, you truly honor your father and mother's legacy beautifully as the custodian for this generation and the one succeeding you.
Well, thank you for your kindness, John.
We really try and we hope the Lord shines down on
us.
And Lord willing, we'll have another one of the great Hames family back with us next week.
In the meantime, get on over to Southwest Sea Rapids and check out these beautiful, safe, affordable homes, Hames Homes, the Homes people, and we'll be back right after this.
Economics is the study of human choice in the world we live.
Faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.
By investigating faith in economics, we can learn how they lead to human flourishing.
This is the Faith in Economics podcast, a presentation of the Gortney Institute at Ottawa University.
Welcome to our show today.
My name is Peter Jacobson.
I'm the Courtney Professor of Economic Education and Research.
Joining us today, we have Dr. Justin Clark, the Menard Family Professor of Philosophy and Ethics.
We also have Dr. Russ McCullough, the Wayne Angel Chair of Economics and founder of the Courtney Institute.
All right, so topic today is writing.
And I don't know about you listeners, but I've never been a big fan of writing.
Apparently, I'm not very good at it either.
It took me a long time to get my dissertation done, and I, you know...
I do some pieces here and there, but I just overall don't find it especially enjoyable.
But maybe I'll learn some things as we go.
But Justin, you wanted to kick this thing off and kind of get into the background.
Yeah.
So I guess I was when Peter brought up this topic, it reminded me of this short story by the science fiction author Ted Chang, C-H-I-A-N-G.
And he has this great collection of short stories.
And one of them
It's called The Truth of Fact and The Truth of Fiction.
And the storyline alternates between a story that happens in the past and during like the colonization of Africa and between a missionary and a native.
And also a storyline that happens in the somewhat near future between a dad and his daughter.
And these stories are told in parallel.
And I'll just give you...
a brief kind of synopsis of what happens in that in the story in the future they live in a society that's pretty similar to ours everybody wears a kind of device that records everything you do all the time so like those glasses from meta or whatever and the new development that comes about is that all the sudden there's this technological development that allows you to be able to act
access any part of your past life and search through anything that you have recorded in a much more accessible way so that if you wanted to find any
anything that's ever happened, you could just immediately look it up.
And so the story hits like right in between everybody's been recording their own life for a while.
And now all of a sudden, we have the ability to access all the information index in a very particular way.
So kind of like what happened when Google came onto the web, right?
The web was there before Google.
The benefit of Google was being able to navigate the web and access all the information in an interesting way.
And what happens between the father and the daughter is that the
The father and the daughter, the father's wife leaves at some point.
And we hear the story from the father's perspective and he says that the most painful thing was, you know, my daughter one night saying,
I hate you.
You're the reason she left."
And it hurt him so bad.
It really strained his relationship with his daughter, and they had never spoken about it.
She went off to college, and then they finally were able to kind of make amends later on after a bunch of time had passed.
And then parallel with that, we have a story about a missionary going to a village where nobody has seen like the written, they have no concept of the written language.
and it's an oral culture, right?
And so the person, we hear this story from the perspective of the person who is familiar only with the oral culture and he's talking about his interactions with this missionary who is teaching him how to write and is saying, you know, when you write stuff down, you can actually know that I'm saying the same thing as what was said before, right?
We can keep our stories
the same over time because we can write them down.
And then if we flash back to the future story, the dad finally says, you know, I finally had enough.
I felt like I was ready to go revisit that moment where my daughter told me that, you know, I'm the reason she left and she hated me.
And like the big reveal is that when he looks at it, he is the one who says, I hate you.
You're the reason she left.
Right.
And then, you know, he talks to his daughter about it and apologizes.
And she's like, yeah.
Yeah, I had to go to therapy in college.
I had to do all this work.
You think like our relationships just got better by itself?
No, it didn't.
And it just like, I can't believe you.
How could you have thought that happened, right?
And the point of juxtaposing these two stories this way, and then when you go back to the story with the missionary and the pre-written language person is he says, well, it's nice to be able to keep some of these aspects of the story the same, but you're losing
something when you just say, oh, it's the same because I say the same words in the same order.
You know, when Jerry tells the story, he tells it truthfully and he tells it truthfully with, you know, this way and this kind of expression.
And what I take the story is trying to illustrate is that for thousands of years, arguably hundreds of thousands of years, humans were an oral culture.
And that is the way we transmitted information.
And it was actually an enormous
revolution in the way we dealt with each other to be able to write things down and keep track of things in an objective manner over time.
And it seems like what that software was doing in the second part of the story was something similar.
If you can think about the ways in which we misremember or selectively remember things, it would be a very weird, you can imagine, arguments you've had with your spouse.
And sometimes they
Centron like you said this like no I didn't I said it this way well your tone was this no it wasn't I was calm and I just thought that would bear on a discussion about writing and what writing is and kind of how we do it and how maybe writing and stories whether they're oral or not kind of shape us maybe that's not what anybody else had in mind but it took up a decent amount of time.
Let's change to more relevant topic.
No, I think that's a good thing to jump off of.
I agree with the points that is being illustrated in the older, like the older of the two stories, that something is gained by written, you know, cataloging or whatever, indexing.
But something is lost too, I agree with that.
I think that's an interesting juxtaposition, because we think about the benefits, we don't think about the costs.
Interestingly though, I personally am
thinking about another benefit of writing, which is that I think that writing is more active thinking than we give it credit for.
Justin has brought me slowly around to the idea over the years that people don't have access to their own mental states with perfect clarity.
In other words, people don't always know what they want, right?
Not only do they not know what would be best for them, but they sometimes don't even know why they're wanting the things that they're wanting, right?
That sort of idea.
uh, was kind of foreign to me five years ago, but I think Justin's brought me around to it.
And I think writing is interesting because I think a lot of writing is like people being forced to like introspect about why they think the things that they think.
Writing, I have an interesting relationship with writing because I think I've always had just like from my dad, like the ability to speak like spontaneously, and that's not anything, something I've ever had a problem with, but I don't think I'm a very good writer.
I never enjoyed writing classes like through high school.
There was only one class that I ever enjoyed that involved with writing.
It was like my last English class that I had.
And so I've never enjoyed writing.
I don't know why.
I think it's because I'm not naturally good at it.
And so writing is interesting to me because like
I think now everybody's doing more of it, but in a like weird way, which is like a lot of people are doing like short form writing now.
It's like with social media, texting, those sorts of things.
And I'm not going anywhere with this.
I don't have the exact idea of like what that means, but it I don't know if that's like aggressive for the benefits of writing or if the larger quantity is like beneficial.
But I just think that like the ability to write is is
Something that helps people evolve in their thinking, and it will be interesting to see over the years is like we move into more tool-assisted writing, which is the direction people are moving right now.
If that has any impact on the broader culture, any impact on our introspection.
Some of my favorite writings I've noticed are by people who went through the Great War, so like World War I, World War II.
I'm talking both fiction and nonfiction, right?
So like Tolkien, like Lewis, these are, you know, examples, but I also enjoy like Junger, I've talked about before.
who did kind of like an autobiographical book of his time in World War I. And I don't know, I think that without those accounts you kind of lose some of the history in an interesting way.
Like you can see these people work through those ideas in their books.
I don't know what that becomes in a world of social media.
I don't know what that becomes in a world of like AI assisted writing.
Maybe nothing.
Maybe it doesn't really have any impact.
But I'm just kind of throwing things out there at this point.
But I think your points will take ingestion.
There's definitely costs that we don't think about.
But I think the benefit we often don't think about is that it's a means of thinking, really.
So I'll spitball a few things and then probably run to freak.
trying to decompress all of it later.
So grammar has gone out the window with texting.
And so my question is, is there going to be a cost for us not having a standardized written form that we follow more regularly?
So this is slowly evolved into how students contact their professors and no capitalization and no commons and no periods.
And I think even AI assisted won't
overcome that lack of knowledge of standardization that might help us communicate in a written form better.
So I don't know if there's something maybe hiding lurking in the bushes there for that.
And then I think there is value with handwriting as opposed to typing.
So there's been some research and so I always advocate my students because of a
research that I saw 10, 15 years ago that writing stuff by hand actually sticks with you better than typing even.
So for taking notes, certainly not pulling your phone out and taking a picture of my whiteboard, but actually writing the stuff down as you go, research shows is better to stick with you.
And so I think if that type of writing helps stick with you, then that's, again, maybe a culture.
type culture development thing that could be assisted by continuing to have some handwritten writing.
So I'll throw those two things out there.
I don't know if you got Justin staring me down here, otherwise we're about ready for a break, but you got you got a cliffhanger to how not mean it.
Okay, all right, that sounds good.
So that looks like a good spot.
And we'll pick up from there when we return.
Auto University has an exciting new major, PPE, which stands for philosophy, politics and economics.
Each of these fields is interesting in their own right, but they intersect in ways that are important to understand both individually and for your community.
If you find philosophy fascinating but want to make sure that your study of the subject is practical, if you enjoy economic analysis but want to see how economic laws interact with more principles, if you are interested in politics but want to explore how economic and ethical realities constrain our political choices, you should consider the PPE program at Ottawa University.
This spring, Ottawa University is organizing a PPE League competition or Politics, Philosophy, and Economics.
Students in this competition will compete leveraging the ideas of philosophy, politics, and economics in various events.
If you're a professor or an advisor of college students and you're interested in your school competing in PPE League this spring, contact Peter, Justin, or Russ today.
By 2030, the Gorton Institute will be known for its alumni, supporters, and participants who incorporate economic understanding with their faith in their careers, vocations, communities, and personal lives.
We have some great programming going on for high school students.
We have an online microeconomics class.
Yes, you can earn college credit for $200 by taking an online class.
It's affordable, flexible, layered with support.
Our new online micro is optimized for you.
If you'd like to consider some events for your high school students or that class, please contact Justin, Peter, or Russ today.
All right.
So we're back.
And Justin, you want to pick up with some of those points and add on to that?
Yeah.
So I did like your point about handwriting.
And I think it's good.
Now, I want to distinguish the two different types of writing.
One is for like note taking.
And I think of that as getting information in your head.
And I think handwriting is better for that.
I actually think
typing is way better for the other version, which is writing, getting your thoughts down, getting information out of you, right?
And I'll say why I think so in a second.
But I do think you're right that handwriting notes is far superior and does help you remember things more.
I want to jump back to what what Peter was talking about, because I think this is really important that this idea of writing as thinking, and it's a kind of in the same way that like long division is a kind of thinking that you do on paper.
Writing is a kind of thinking that you do kind of outside of your own head in a way.
And everybody kind of thinks that all our thoughts hang together in a consistent manner.
It's part of having a thought that you think that your own web of beliefs is kind of consistent.
But it's kind of a feature of our web of beliefs that we usually only occupy one position on it at any one time.
And we're not, we don't quite...
get a lay of the land of our beliefs, as it were, as well as we do when we try to write them all down.
into coherent propositions.
And we can often find that there are huge gaps in our thinking when we do this.
And so I'm 100% on board with Peter with regard to the importance of writing as kind of like embodied cognition or the classic quote that I always tell my students is, I write to figure out what I think, right?
I'm not quite sure what I think unless I can put it into propositional form.
And I think that this is part of what makes AI
as writing assistants so dangerous because if it's true that we write to figure out what we think and if we kind of externalize part of that process and let somebody else take care of making sure you know that our thoughts go down onto paper the right way you are kind of abdicating your own
authority and autonomy with regard to your own thoughts, which I think is really dangerous.
You can kind of let somebody else... Oh, I guess that's what I meant.
That sounds better than, you know, what I was trying to say.
Yeah, that's probably what I meant.
That does kind of mesh better with what I was saying earlier.
It's very easy to just think that you are the one in the driver's seat when that's happening, rather than, um, it was once a cartoon I saw that was, uh, you know, with the free will debate, but it had a monkey sitting on a tiger, riding backwards on a tiger, holding a steering wheel that wasn't attached to anything, right?
And the idea being that, like, the monkey sees the stuff that's going on and thinks, oh, it must be because I'm doing, I'm
blowing out the steering wheel that we're going where we're going.
No, it's all what the tiger's doing, right?
And I think that something like that, we're in danger of something like that being the case when we kind of, you know, externalize our writing and we leave it to some AI software to try and come up with what we ought to say.
Yeah.
Thanks again, guys.
Tell your friends about the podcast, kxel.com slash Jacobson, J-A-C-O-B-S-E-N.
In the meantime, listen to all the wisdom of Jeff Stein.
during his weekday news and commentary, and folks, always remember and never forget to be safe, be smart, be good, be strong, love Jesus Christ, and God blesses everyone.
Till we meet again, have a great weekend and bye-bye.