Speaker Pat Grassley dropped a new property tax proposal this week — and we’ll be honest, it’s a lot. The three-pager is dense, and we’re still not sure we can answer the question every homeowner is actually asking: will my taxes go down, or just up more slowly?

House bill

Triples the homestead exemption for all residential owners. Hard 2% cap on local government revenue. No gas tax, no age-based carve-outs.

Senate bill

Blows up the rollback system entirely. Raises the gas tax, gives local governments inflation flexibility, and heavily favors homeowners 65+.

Bottom line

These two chambers are miles apart. We don’t see adjournment next week — but something has to pass. Failing on the session’s top priority isn’t an option.

Campaign ads: gubernatorial race

Randy Feenstra - Link to ad: Randy Feenstra Hard Work

Trump, Trump, Trump — and a property tax freeze that sounds great on the trail but has never been seriously on the table at the Capitol. He knows that. He was Ways and Means chair.

Zach Lahn - Link to ad: Zach Lahn Defend Our Land

“Defend Our Land” — tax Wall Street hedge funds and data centers to buy down property taxes. Sharp message, strong production. Can he build enough name recognition before June 2nd? That’s the question.

Rob Sand - Link to ad: Rob Sand Stealing is Bad

No primary, so he’s already playing the general. Carhartt, tough-on-crime energy, mandatory jail time for stealing from taxpayers. A preemptive strike before Republicans can paint him as soft.

Also this week

A conference committee on the governor’s immigration bill — rare under the Republican trifecta — over an E-Verify dispute nobody quite understood. We’re covering U.S. Senate race ads next week.

AI generated transcript below:

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Dave Price: Welcome, everybody, to the Iowa Down Ballad Podcast. Glad that you are joining us today. I’m Dave Price, along with my co-hosts, Kathie Obradovich, Laura Bell, and fellow collaborators from the Iowa Writers Collaborative. Hello, ladies, how are you?

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Kathie Obradovich: Doing great, how are you?

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Dave Price: Yeah, good. I love… is that fuchsia you’re wearing today?

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Kathie Obradovich: Mmm, yeah, probably.

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Dave Price: I was on my… we had a TV consultant years and years ago who had, you know, that, like, did our home…

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Dave Price: workup or whatever, and would tell us, because I… apparently I’m, like, an autumn.

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Dave Price: But I think that color was in my scheme, if I remember right.

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Kathie Obradovich: the book.

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Dave Price: Just because I thought, why not? It’s like a souvenir, it’s like 15 years old, so why not?

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Kathie Obradovich: wear a lot of fuchsia back then?

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Dave Price: Not a lot, but I do have one tie that has that color in it, and I’m sorry for those of you who are only listening and not watching, and you’re thinking, what the heck are these people talking about?

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Kathie Obradovich: Just…

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Dave Price: Take my word for it that Kathie has a great-looking fuchsia-like sweater to begin our.

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Kathie Obradovich: It’s just a t-shirt.

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Dave Price: Okay, well, whatever, who cares, it looks good. It looks good on video. We’re also talking before we could have a big ol’ storm, so I’ll be curious as everybody tunes into this this weekend, hopefully this storm has missed us, but,

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Dave Price: That is on my mind as… as we assemble today. Hey, I thought… I know we talked about property taxes a lot, but I feel like we need to do it again, and, Thursday, we got this handout. Reminds me of, like, being in class again in school. It is a 3-pager.

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Dave Price: that we got from Speaker Pat Grassley. He, to his credit.

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Dave Price: he does an avail with the media basically every week. Almost every single.

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Laura Belin: Almost every week, yep.

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Dave Price: Sometimes if he’s had a family thing where he’s had to hustle home for one of the kids’ games or something, they don’t always do it, maybe, but to his credit, he almost always does it, and for those of you who care about this kind of stuff, it’s really anything goes. I mean, they don’t screen the questions or anything like that. So anyway, so it was sort of like this unveil, you know, he starts kind of teasing it up and teeing it up at the beginning, like, hey, we’re gonna have…

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Dave Price: Now, he called it a compromise. I think it takes two to compromise, but,

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Dave Price: Regardless, so, perhaps his caucus has come up with this new proposal for property tax reform, and then during the course of the

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Dave Price: Availability we had with him, then, staff brought out the little handouts.

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Dave Price: Laura, you were standing very close to me during this thing. If there is any subject that I have covered this legislative session that makes me feel dumber

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Dave Price: than property taxes. I really do not know what it is. I have been a homeowner for years. This would be, in our married life, our third house, I think, because we lived in a townhouse when we got married.

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Dave Price: All I know is you pay it, like, twice a year, or however you pay it.

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Dave Price: This was supposed to be a simpler version.

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Dave Price: And, no offense to the speaker, but I do not find this simple, nor do I find, as a television dude, the ability to look through a three-pager and stand in front of a live camera for a minute and a half and break this down in ways that people can watch and go.

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Dave Price: Hey, honey, our taxes are going up or down, but I’m not sure you can really figure it out.

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Laura Belin: It’s such a complicated system.

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Kathie Obradovich: Well, I think we should dedicate a future show to the difference between a homestead tax exemption and a.

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Dave Price: Fantastic.

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Kathie Obradovich: tax credit. Yes. It’s like, I was reading Robin Opsel’s story, and I was like, read this three times. Okay, what is the difference between a homestead tax exemption or a homestead tax credit?

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Dave Price: It’s better with an exemption than a credit.

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Kathie Obradovich: I mean.

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Laura Belin: I mean, for the people listening, there were about 15 minutes of Q&A just on the property tax.

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Dave Price: Excuse me.

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Laura Belin: And I have been posting the videos of Pat Grassley’s media veils every week that he’s done them. I’ve been posting those on the Bleeding Heartland YouTube channel. So if anyone wants, like, the director’s cut to see exactly what Speaker Grassley said, you can go and find that. But it… I mean, I felt that

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Laura Belin: the House Republicans are trying to incorporate some ideas from the Senate

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Laura Belin: bill that we discussed last week, but it still seems to me that they are so far apart, just philosophically. Like, they don’t have… the Senate wants to completely get rid of that rollback system that’s very complicated. They’re not touching that. The Senate wants to raise the gas tax.

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Laura Belin: They’re not doing that. The Senate wants this broad relief.

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Laura Belin: if you’re age 65 and up, they’re not doing that. They’re doing something that I think politically, is better… is a better sell, what the House Republicans are doing, which is that

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Laura Belin: every homeowner gets something, and it is a little bit complicated. Yeah, I also didn’t understand the difference between the homestead tax credit and the homestead tax exemption, but they are increasing it, so whatever it is.

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Laura Belin: you are going to get more of a break than what you currently get on the home that you own. And the one.

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Kathie Obradovich: What I gather is that the difference is who… who loses the money. So, in one homestead Tax Credit, the state is paying for that. Homestead’s tax exemption, it comes out of the tax base, and the local governments take the hit for that. Right. So I think that… I think it doesn’t really make that much difference to… to you and me. I think the difference is who pays.

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Laura Belin: Well, they are tripling it, though, so you…

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Kathie Obradovich: Yeah.

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Laura Belin: be an increase in the exemption, so that… so as you say, then the local governments… I mean, the House bill is definitely worse for the local governments, because they still have that firm cap of 2% increased revenue year on year, with exceptions for new growth and schools and debt servicing. But the Senate bill was much more flexible for local governments, because they had an inflation adjustment.

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Laura Belin: in there. So, I mean, the House bill is definitely gonna be tougher, but they…

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Laura Belin: some of the things there, I didn’t really understand exactly what they were doing on the… what… with this penny, the save, the penny sales tax thing, they’re doing something, and he kept talking about how this was gonna be…

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Laura Belin: a buy-down of the 504? I don’t know. I didn’t… I didn’t understand… is it the 504… 540 levy? I didn’t… or I guess maybe that’s the homestead that’s buying down the 540 levy. I mean, it’s very kind.

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Dave Price: The homestead is.

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Laura Belin: Homestead. So, Dave, I thought, I mean.

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Laura Belin: Dave, I thought you asked a really good question, like, are people actually going to see their property taxes go down, or is the goal just to get them to not rise as quickly? I mean, and I don’t know that he could really give a clear answer on that. I imagine it depends on what kind of homeowner you are.

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Dave Price: Yeah, and, one thing that Steven Gruber Miller has done well before in a previous story is to try to break down a story for the register, like, okay, how does this impact this group, this group, this group, right? And that’s what, you know, we’ve tried to do on our TV stories as well.

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Dave Price: And that’s what I’ve struggled with, like crazy, with the property tax stuff.

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Dave Price: Because that’s what people want to know. I appreciate it if you’re a local leader, you want to know if you’re going to get hosed, what, you know, and how badly your revenues are going to get impacted by this. But as the homeowner, you want to know personally what’s going to happen

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Dave Price: to me, and then you start thinking about what’s it gonna mean for my community, and all that stuff, and so I had tried to ask him that, and…

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Dave Price: I thought, secondarily, I interviewed Senator Chuck Grassley this week, in his avail, speaking of Grassley’s here.

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Dave Price: And when he was talking about… I had asked him about… Trump did that interview on Fox Business, where he said, hey, in the midterms, your gas prices might still be where they are, or maybe even higher, right? Which is a little counter to what they’ve been saying about…

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Dave Price: when the war is done, prices are gonna go down. So those things don’t add up.

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Dave Price: Senator Grassley’s take on that is that Trump is trying to… doesn’t want to over-promise and under-deliver. So in this case, he’s doing the flip side, and Senator Grassley’s like, that’s what Trump’s done on some other things, and it doesn’t work out that well, so whatever.

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Dave Price: So, in that same vein of thinking, I have been curious with this whole process, like, We get it.

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Dave Price: you’re hearing from constituents, you say that property taxes are too high, so Lynn, like, what’s the expectation?

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Dave Price: for people who are paying attention to this. Should they expect they’re gonna go down, or do they just go up less?

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Dave Price: And I… as you know, Laura, there were… there were 3 of us, I think, in that news conference who asked my question in similar ways.

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Dave Price: and… The… there is no easy…

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Dave Price: 30-second answer, and because I’m not sure that people can really say that, but then fast forward to a half hour later, the governor had her avail.

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Dave Price: And I asked her the same thing, and she had said, well, I want both.

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Dave Price: my hope is that property taxes for people can go down right away, plus we bend the curve in the system and blah blah blah, and I thought, that was at least

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Dave Price: a more concise answer, we’ll see if they can do that, but I still don’t understand through this whole process, when we fast forward to next year.

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Dave Price: For many of us, where our taxes are going.

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Laura Belin: I don’t think that the governor’s bill actually does that, though. I mean, I know that the governor’s bill has kind of been left by the wayside, most of it, but unless you’re 65, I don’t know that the governor’s bill that anybody could say for sure that they were… their property taxes were gonna go down.

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Dave Price: And did you know…

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Laura Belin: proposal.

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Dave Price: when I asked her about… because I thought the whole time, maybe.

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Dave Price: the Republicans would steal the House Democrats’ idea about the rebates, and I know you’ve asked several times about this, so it’s $1,000 for homeowners, $500 for renters, and I get it that, you know, they don’t have a ton of money to play with, but I thought that would be an immediate thing, even if you just do a one-year thing.

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Dave Price: And…

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Dave Price: push that out to Iowans as we lead into an election year, right? So that there is something very tangible, even if you’re a renter, you’re like, sweet, 500 bucks. And the governor didn’t rule that out, I don’t know what to make from that, but she…

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Laura Belin: It’s not anywhere in anybody’s bill, so as far as I’m concerned.

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Dave Price: Yeah, she would say yes. We don’t know what’s going on in that private room, though.

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Laura Belin: Well, but I’d be really surprised if all of a sudden, at the 11th hour, they pulled in an idea from the Democrats’ bill that hasn’t been considered before, but I guess anything could happen, right? I mean, she also said when Erin Murphy asked her, are you disappointed that the legislature hasn’t done anything with any of your Doge task force recommendations? She was like, well, there’s a lot of time and session left, and we all said.

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Dave Price: I know, we’re like, really? A lot of time?

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Laura Belin: I don’t think that there is… I don’t think that they’re all of a sudden gonna implement the Doge recommendation, but maybe there is something secret that they’re gonna slip into a budget bill, who knows?

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Kathie Obradovich: Yeah, they… it’s a hard sell to voters, I think, and to taxpayers when you’re gonna say, okay, your tax… your property taxes are still gonna go up, but they’re just not going to go up as much, because there’s no way for people to know.

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Kathie Obradovich: how much their property taxes would have gone up, you know, it’s very hard to sell that. But, you know, as we’ve mentioned here before, you’re not gonna see

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Kathie Obradovich: any kind of break on your property taxes before the election either. So, it’s really, you know, about how they can message these plans. And, you know, I do think, anything with a gas tax in it.

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Kathie Obradovich: you know, you completely blow your messaging, you know? So that’s, you know, I do give the Senate credit for trying to offset some of this cost to local governments, because I think that that’s…

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Kathie Obradovich: Again, as we’ve said out here before, it’s easier for lawmakers to cut property taxes because they don’t have to live with the consequences in their budgets. They, they only have to, they live with it, through their constituents and the cities and counties in their districts. So, so I, you know, I think that we’re gonna,

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Kathie Obradovich: Ultimately, they’re trying to figure out, you know, what is the best…

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Kathie Obradovich: That they can do this year that…

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Kathie Obradovich: Taxpayers and voters will recognize as making a difference for them.

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Laura Belin: I mean, one of the strange things is that the lead negotiator on this for the Senate, Dan Dawson, he’s not up for re-election this year.

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Laura Belin: The Senate Majority Leader, Mike Clemish, is also not up for re-election this year, so I feel like they… there’s maybe less of a sense of urgency. I know they do have some members with tough races, but I don’t know, like.

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Laura Belin: I mean, if they really go to the mat for these huge systemic changes, it doesn’t seem like the House Republicans are willing to go along with that. I don’t know. I don’t think we’re getting out of here next week, let’s just put it that way.

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Dave Price: Kathie has already promised that there will be a show here on the Homestead credit versus exemption. I do… I would like to know when that show is, so I can be on vacation that week,

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Kathie Obradovich: I don’t think I promised that, I just said… I threw that out as an idea for.

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Dave Price: Oh, okay. They would take up.

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Kathie Obradovich: A whole show to explain, maybe.

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Dave Price: Seriously, the other thing would be this 540 levy.

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Dave Price: But Kathie, you just said something that I was thinking about when I was trying to figure all this stuff up out last night.

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Dave Price: So, if the homestead tax credit is… that was a state expense, because they are, I believe in this house plan, aren’t they absorbing more of the cost from the locals on the school levies?

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Dave Price: Because when I had that explained to me, I thought… I thought, wow, that surprises me if the state’s gonna take on more expense. I thought they would be, in light of the budget situation, they’d be trying to cut money, but aren’t they… aren’t they pulling some of that away with this $54,000?

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Laura Belin: The Senate bill does that. The Senate bill pulls some of the school expenses to the state.

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Dave Price: Well, when it says the funds from the homestead credit, $175 million goes to buying down the 540 levy.

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Kathie Obradovich: Yeah, this is getting further into the weeds than I want to go.

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Dave Price: Can we phone a friend right now, Regis? Really?

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Dave Price: Let’s see where this is going. I still… I totally agree this is super complicated, but,

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Dave Price: They have to… they have to pass something before they leave. They won’t go home without anything.

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Kathie Obradovich: I think they have to pass something. I, you know, it comes off as a big flop with the second year. And, you know, really the top Republican priority, it’s a bipartisan priority, both parties say they want to do something about property taxes, and, you know, you’ve got this trifecta, possibly, depending on what happens with the governor’s race for the last

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Kathie Obradovich: Last time in a while.

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Kathie Obradovich: They’ve got to do something that, you know, I think that reinforces the idea that, that they’re effective, and they… not being able to pass something significant on property taxes really undermines that.

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Dave Price: Laura, do you remember the way the governor asked this? I wish I could play the tape right now.

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Dave Price: I thought she phrased it in such a way, and she compared it to a previous… a totally separate issue, when she was talking, answering questions about property taxes, that sometimes you can do things, do something, and then you kind of adjust in the future, and I can’t remember what the issue.

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Laura Belin: Treasurer’s better.

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Dave Price: but it made me…

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Laura Belin: You can find that, because I also put the governor’s press conference video on my YouTube channel.

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Dave Price: Of course you did. This is really awful.

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Laura Belin: Somebody can go and look and see what she said.

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Dave Price: But I thought that that could be a way…

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Dave Price: You know, if they do something.

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Dave Price: then you go back, and then maybe it’s more somethings in the next few years, depending on what the makeup is and stuff. I don’t know, I can’t remember her phrase.

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Laura Belin: Yeah, well, there, I mean…

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Laura Belin: Right, because the Senate bill would repeal the property tax thing they passed in 2023, the House File 718 that they’ve determined didn’t work the way they wanted it to.

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Dave Price: On the commercial side?

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Laura Belin: Yeah, I feel like the…

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Laura Belin: I feel like what they need to do is have something, like, Dave, to your question that you kept asking. They need to be able to tell people a story, an elevator speech, or whatever you want to call it. What is this going to actually do for your property taxes? And the advantage of the House bill is that

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Laura Belin: any property, any residential property owner, regardless of age, is going to get something, something additional on the house they live in, you know, whereas the Senate bill is much more skewed toward people who are 65 and up, although there are

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Laura Belin: some benefits that they could try to claim are for other people, but I feel like that’s where, politically, that may be why the House Republicans have shied away from this approach of giving more relief to seniors.

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Dave Price: Do we want to talk quickly about the one conference committee?

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Dave Price: I want to get to the ads, before we run out of time here, but, Laura, you brought this up in the media room about insisting…

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Dave Price: And if this has become more common, but, and it’s so inside baseball stuff here, but, so on the governor’s immigration bill…

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Dave Price: you’ve got the two sides, the House and the Senate, that are just dug in and refusing to accept the other’s idea, so basically they’re just stuck, they’re stopped.

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Dave Price: We’re sort of calling timeout, and you’re gonna have representatives from each chamber and each party in this conference committee that will meet in the next week or two, we presume, to see if they can hammer out what the final agreement is.

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Laura Belin: I mean, it’s kind of strange to me. They haven’t done very many conference committees since they’ve had the Republican trifecta, and I remember that they had one a couple of years ago on this driver’s.

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Dave Price: driver.

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Laura Belin: Went to that because my son was…

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Dave Price: Becoming of that age.

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Laura Belin: We all went to that in the middle of the night, and then, like, nobody had time to write about it, because it was on the last night when everything was ready to adjourn, but…

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Dave Price: Totally.

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Laura Belin: I remember thinking, this is really strange, like, of all of the issues, because most of the time they do their backdoor negotiating, you know, without having a formal conference committee appointed. So, I didn’t really understand on these immigration bills

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Laura Belin: like, I guess the main difference is that they want to have the,

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Laura Belin: the House version wants to have new hires, they have to use the federal E-Verify and save programs for state agencies. I mean, to me, it didn’t seem like they were that far apart that they would need to go through this conference committee, but I don’t know, what do you think?

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Kathie Obradovich: what was said on the Senate floor was, you know, that these things belong in separate bills, which seems like a very thin concern. They combine

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Kathie Obradovich: you know, completely different topics in bills if the majority wants to. So, what I got from that is there’s… there’s some people in the caucus that, for some… for whatever reason, want to vote for the original bill, but not for this, this addition with E-Verify. And, you know, there are some business owners and other people who don’t like E-Verify. They, you know, it’s…

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Kathie Obradovich: You know, there’s concern about accuracy, etc. So, what I gathered was there must be some people that don’t want, for whatever reason, to vote for that part of it.

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Laura Belin: But the strange thing is, I think in past years, the Senate has passed E-Verify requirements, I think, for private employers that then the House didn’t take up.

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Laura Belin: Because I remember that the last couple years, we’ve had issues where… remember how the House had that bill on so-called smuggling, that then it didn’t get through the Senate, and the Senate had an E-Verify bill? So, I guess I don’t really understand what is the reason, but I’m… I guess I’m looking forward to attending the conference committee.

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Dave Price: Kathie sort of figured this out here.

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Dave Price: I wonder if Kathie, you’ve already solved this, and they strip that out, and they do a pared-down version and call it good.

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Laura Belin: could have done that already.

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Laura Belin: It’s a strange thing.

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Kathie Obradovich: Or they just run another bill. I mean, why not strip it out? I mean, we’ve seen bills pop up at the last minute. They can… they can easily, create another… a separate bill and run that through, so…

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Dave Price: Hey, let’s do… let’s do a little, campaign talk in our final minutes here. We have a few new ads. I can’t imagine, in this show, we’re gonna spend a ton of time on ads very frequently, but perhaps in this case, because they’re sort of introductory ads for the most part, and we can get some thematic

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Dave Price: ideas, maybe, about what some of these candidates are doing.

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Kathie Obradovich: Well, and two of the three that we are… well, if we want to talk about all four, there’s a new ad that dropped today, but two of the three gubernatorial ads mention property taxes, so it kind of fits with our topic today.

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Dave Price: Exactly, yes, brilliant transition. Alright, so let’s do the Randy Feenstra, the Republican running here, Kathie, since you teed us up here.

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Dave Price: I am just struck… the property tax thing is one thing, and I’ve had conversations with a few people about, boy, what’s he gonna do if, you know, they actually pass something big, this legislative session that sort of takes that off his list, but…

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Dave Price: Man, he is working so hard.

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Dave Price: in every other sentence other than taking the state to new heights, it’s Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. He is working so hard to convince people that he is tight with Trump, a Trump Republican, I think he says in the.

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Kathie Obradovich: Yeah, the Trump Republican was the… and, you know, his last ad also was all about, immigration reform and, you know, helping take credit for, the Trump administration’s, you know, mass deportation, etc. So, yeah, I think, you know, that in this competitive

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Kathie Obradovich: primary,

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Kathie Obradovich: You know, Donald Trump is a primary audience for these ads, you know, maybe more so even than, than Republican primary voters.

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Kathie Obradovich: But yeah, just to touch on the property tax thing, so his… his position is he’s going to freeze property taxes, which I think, you know, if…

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Kathie Obradovich: anyone… any Republican in the State House thought that would work. That would be their magic, easy solution, right? But they’ve been talking about this for a couple of years now. Freezing property taxes is… has not been on the table at any point, I don’t think. And so, to… you suggest that as a… it’s a good

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Kathie Obradovich: campaign slogan. But the reality of it

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Kathie Obradovich: You know, I just think if that was the easy solution, they would be doing it right now, and they’re not.

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Dave Price: And…

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Kathie Obradovich: It just, you know, I don’t think it’s anything more than a campaign slogan.

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Dave Price: And as we know, Hull started out… I’m sorry, Feenstra started out in Hull as a city administrator there, so he knows local government, and he would also know what a property tax freeze would… how much it would concern.

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Dave Price: local governments.

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Kathie Obradovich: Yes, and plus he was a Ways and Means Chair in the State Senate, if I’m not mistaken, so he…

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Laura Belin: He was.

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Kathie Obradovich: does know the issue, and he knows how complicated it is, and he probably worked on property tax bills when he was in the State Senate. So I… I have a little bit of a hard time

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Kathie Obradovich: Taking that seriously.

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Laura Belin: I just felt, just stylistically, I was more interested in the ad because we heard Feenster’s own voice talking, which most of his ads, he just has a voiceover with visuals of him, and so I felt maybe he seemed… maybe he feels that he needs to compete with the other candidates, because Adam Steen, he’s not on TV yet, but he’s got digital ads going where he says, I’m a pro-Trump Christian conservative, speaking in his own voice, and Zach Lahn

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Laura Belin: ads, both digital and TV, or Zach Lahn speaking in his own voice. So, I mean, Randy Feenstra’s delivery is not the most polished, really, or the most natural sounding, but at least he’s… I felt that that was interesting, that he was trying to address the voters more directly.

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Dave Price: Anything that stuck out to you, Laura, and the other two, Steen and Lahn?

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Laura Belin: Well, I mean…

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Laura Belin: Zach Lahn, I just continue to question whether he has enough time to build up his name recognition before June 2nd, but I feel that the message, the latest ad I saw from him was about data centers and how he wants them to pay five times the property taxes, and we shouldn’t be giving handouts to these multi-billion dollar companies, and I feel like that’s a good message, but…

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Laura Belin: I just… it’s hard in a crowded field

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Laura Belin: for somebody, if he were one-on-one against Feenstra, I think he’d have more success with that, maybe, but we’ll see. Stranger things have happened in politics. The production values are pretty strong, I think.

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Kathie Obradovich: Yeah, and Will Lahn, again, his main message of his first ad is property taxes, in the sense that he’s saying he wants to tax… I think what he says in the ad is tax out of state.

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Kathie Obradovich: property owners… no, Wall Street hedge funds is what he says in the ad, but he’s also said tax out-of-state property owners and tax data centers, and put that money into buying down property taxes, which, again, I think, first of all.

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Kathie Obradovich: real hard sell with Republicans at the State House to say… I mean, they don’t even want to raise the gas tax, but to raise taxes on businesses, you know, and these data centers that, are essentially

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Kathie Obradovich: aimed at attracting, businesses that need that energy, so… so I think that that is a hard sell. Also, I’m just not sure… I haven’t seen how… how the math works on those. You know, can you really raise…

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Kathie Obradovich: enough money from taxing these… these certain entities to buy down property taxes for everybody else. I… I have a question about that. And also, yeah, out-of-state property owners, who are the… a lot of out-of-state property owners are the kids and grandkids of

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Kathie Obradovich: you know, Iowans who have moved out of state, and so I, you know, that is a dicey issue as well.

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Laura Belin: You’re right. The first TV ad of Zach Lahn, it did talk about hedge funds and Wall Street hedge funds. I was thinking… I think it was a digital ad that I saw that was… that had a real focus on data centers. I think they’ve decided that data centers are unpopular and taking up…

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Kathie Obradovich: F**k.

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Laura Belin: farmland. I mean, the theme of the Zach Lahn campaign is Defend Our Land, and that’s his pitch, so I think we’re gonna see a number of ads on that theme.

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Dave Price: Alright, how about we save the U.S. Senate ads for next week?

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Laura Belin: That sounds good. Do you want to talk about Rob Stan’s ad?

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Kathie Obradovich: Check that right, Sandra. I’m sorry.

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Dave Price: I’m sorry, I forgot him, yeah, Rob Sand.

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Kathie Obradovich: Yeah, so his first ad, dropped, and interestingly, not about property taxes, it is all about, throwing, people who embezzle from or steal from taxpayers, which a lot of what he sees as state auditor would be.

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Kathie Obradovich: people who embezzle from local governments, but that would have mandatory jail time for these folks, which is… it’s an interesting choice. It’s sort of a tough-on-crime approach. It plays on his former role as an Assistant Attorney General.

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Kathie Obradovich: Under… under Tom Miller’s tenure as a long-time Iowa Attorney General. But again, you know, when you start to sort of think about the details of that, it raises a lot of questions.

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Laura Belin: about that for years.

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Dave Price: He has, for sure, yeah, he keeps pitching that. I saw this more of maybe a preemptive strike.

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Dave Price: Rather than allowing Republicans to portray him as this kind of wussy Democrat, soft on crime kind of thing, whatever, you know, he’s out in his Carhartt and talking about being tough on crime, so he kind of gets out ahead of it while they’re still trying to outmaneuver each other.

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Laura Belin: Yeah, I mean, it’s a general election ad, right? He doesn’t have a primary opponent anymore because Julie Stouch didn’t qualify for the ballot, so he doesn’t have to make an ad that appeals to… specifically to Democratic primary voters.

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Kathie Obradovich: Yeah, but really, I mean, when you think about it, okay, so it’s… this would be mandatory jail time for somebody who steals $10,000 from taxpayers. Taxpayers, generally. We don’t know if we’re talking about, any entity that gets taxpayer money, or if, you know, whatever, but… but I, you know.

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Kathie Obradovich: do you really want to go down the path of having different sentences for people based on who they steal from, as opposed to how much and what they steal? So, you know, you got somebody who steals $10,000 from a… from a widow in a, you know, in a scam.

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Kathie Obradovich: And they probably aren’t going to prison. It’s a white-collar crime.

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Kathie Obradovich: Maybe they would. But then, you know, you’ve got a, you know, a small town, clerk with a gambling problem that steals $10,000 over a period of time, and she’s gonna go to prison. I just think, you know, there’s just problems with the details, so…

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Dave Price: You should have saved that thought and saved that for a debate, to see how you would answer that question on stage.

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Kathie Obradovich: You’re such a…

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Dave Price: moment.

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Kathie Obradovich: It takes too long, you know, you know just as much as I do that debate questions have to be short.

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Dave Price: Good point, good point.

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Dave Price: Good to talk to both of you. We can talk about, how the U.S. Senate candidates are trying to…

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Dave Price: portray themselves to the voters. Let’s tee that up for next week. Absolutely. We’ll see what happens in the State House next week, too, and when next week ends, or if it just blends into the week after, or if we’re going into May, or whatever the hell.

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Kathie Obradovich: Let’s just, let’s just start thinking good thoughts. Sign a die, sign a die, sign a die.

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Dave Price: And we will hear those words.

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Dave Price: Thank you both. Have a great weekend.

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Laura Belin: You too.

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Kathie Obradovich: kid.

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Dave Price: Thanks to all of you who are supporting this show, we greatly appreciate it. Please share the link, the emails, with friends and family, coworkers.

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Dave Price: Friends of church, neighborhood, all that kind of stuff, it helps us grow here, we very much appreciate it. And thanks to all of you who have become new paid subscribers of this to help with the production costs so we can keep this thing going in the future. We appreciate all of you. Have a great weekend, and we will talk to you next week.

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