opinion
Evans op-ed: Let’s See Who Really Is ‘Gaming The System’
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Last week’s news put furrows in my brow. As I ruminated on the headlines and details in the news accounts, I came away convinced something is out of whack somewhere.
IowaWatch (https://www.iowawatch.org/tag/iowa-business/)
Last week’s news put furrows in my brow. As I ruminated on the headlines and details in the news accounts, I came away convinced something is out of whack somewhere.
Rural Iowa is facing several challenges, notably as its population grew a little more than 4 percent from 2000 to 2010, while the rest of the nation grew a little less than 10 percent during that same time. These challenges are being addressed in several ways, as we learn in this IowaWatch podcast.
Iowa faces a workforce shortage, uncertain markets due to tariffs, and an increasingly complicated global connection. That got us to thinking: Where are the points for optimism? We asked business leaders that question for this IowaWatch Connection podcast. For more on the IowaWatch Connection, and where you can hear it on 19 Iowa radio stations every weekend, GO TO THIS LINK.
Iowans like to tell others how great their state is. How do you measure that?
Back in my working days, back when I supervised The Des Moines Register’s business news staff, one of the columnists confessed to our readers that he had trouble balancing his checkbook. My boss didn’t think a business columnist had any business making such a confession. But the columnist was only admitting what many people, if they are truthful, could admit — and that’s their own challenges with mathematics. The experts call this math anxiety. Randy Evans
STRAY THOUGHTS
Randy Evans is the executive director of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council.
“A lot of fellows tried to drive the bull into the wires with him on it,” J.H. Harrington described an incident that had occurred at the Delaware County fair at Delhi in 1859. When a “somewhat intoxicated” fair goer hopped on a bull’s back and rode around a track enclosed by a strange looking fence, Harrington took notice.
This IowaWatch Connection podcast examines Iowa’s tax breaks for new businesses after a recent deal to bring a new Apple Inc. center to Waukee. Good deal or not?
A little more than five years ago a small group of forward-thinking people could only imagine what the Iowa Center for Public Affairs Journalism with its news website, IowaWatch.org, would be. That changed on May 29, 2010, when the first IowaWatch story was published.