David Elbert is a former business editor and columnist for the Des Moines Register. He now writes about local history for DSM Magazine. 

The national debt recently passed the $40 trillion mark, which means your share is about $117,000, or roughly half the cost of a typical Iowa home.

The national debt nearly doubled in the past decade, which is more than twice the rate of inflation during those ten years.

The New York Times published an interesting chart recently that tracked the national debt as a percentage of our Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which is a calculation of all goods and services produced annually.

David Elbert is a former business editor and columnist for the Des Moines Register. He now writes about local history for DSM Magazine. 

Iowa’s long history of low wages is producing a crisis that state officials either can’t see or choose to ignore. The extent of the damage can be seen in a study commissioned last December for the Iowa Department of Education.

The Iowa Capital Dispatch revealed last month that officials who commissioned the report expected it would support their efforts to persuade lawmakers that four-year degrees should be added at Iowa’s two-year community colleges.

Instead, “The study attributes workforce shortages to the business climate, not the higher education system,” wrote Dispatch reporter Brooklyn Draisey.

David Elbert is a former business editor and columnist for the Des Moines Register. He now writes about local history for DSM Magzine. 

Paul Simon’s 1977 song “Slip Slidin’ Away” hit home the other day. It’s about a failing romance, although many believe the lyrics are a metaphor for the 1970s downside that followed euphoric times a decade earlier.

For me, “Slip Slidin’ Away” is what happened to Iowa, as our population, educational standards and health care systems slipped away, along with our news media and tolerance for others.

I wish I knew a solution. I don’t.

David Elbert is a former business editor and columnist for the Des Moines Register. He now writes about local history for DSM Magzine. A version of the following column appeared first in the Des Moines Register.

Wendy Wintersteen is retiring after eight years as the first female president of Iowa State University.

As a native of Ames and a graduate of Iowa State, I should be proud. But I’m not. In retrospect, I probably I expected too much from her.

Before Wintersteen took over the top job at ISU, she was dean of ISU’s highly regarded College of Agriculture. She was, I might add, the first Iowa State president with an agricultural background since 1926 when Raymond Pearson left to become president of the University of Maryland.