Trump Accounts: Iowa Should Put Its Money Where Its Kids Are

 

Iowa has tried just about everything to keep young people here.

 

We’ve run advertising campaigns, handed out tax incentives, built industrial parks, and spent millions making our cities more attractive. We’ve added bike trails, skate parks, breweries, apartments, and entertainment districts. Too many young people pack a U-Haul and leave.

 

Maybe we’re attacking the problem from the wrong end.

 

We wait until someone is 22, diploma in hand and a job offer from Denver or Seattle, then suddenly explain why Iowa is a great place to live. That’s like trying to sell a house after the moving truck pulls away.

 

Trump Accounts give Iowa a chance to try something different. Instead of waiting until young people are ready to leave, we should start investing in them when they’re kids.

 

Trump Accounts are investment accounts for children. Eligible children born from 2025 through 2028 can receive a onetime $1,000 federal contribution if their parents make the required election.

 

After that, parents, relatives, employers, and certain other groups can add money under federal rules. Employers can contribute up to $2,500 a year to the account of an employee or an employee’s child through a qualifying program.

Hello and Goodbye! How Can Iowa Stop the Outflow of People?

 

Iowa has a strange habit.

We spend eighteen years raising kids, building schools, coaching their ball teams, and telling them to study hard and make something of themselves. Then we send them off to a state or local college.

Four years later, they graduate, pack a U-Haul, and hit the highway—headed for anywhere but here.

Hello, college freshman. Goodbye, college graduate.

We’ve been doing this for years, and it’s catching up with us. Iowa is getting older. We’re running short of workers. Too many young Iowans leave and never come back.

In 2008, 47 percent of Iowa college students planned to stay after graduation. By 2024, it was down to 41 percent. Do that year after year, and the numbers add up.

Jobs are part of the problem. A software engineer will find more opportunities in Minneapolis than Fort Dodge. Someone interested in filmmaking or advertising has a bigger playing field in Chicago or Denver than Ottumwa.

But jobs are only one piece of the puzzle. Young people want more than a job. They want a life and people their age to share it with.

It’s like choosing between two restaurants. One is packed. The other has three cars out front, and one belongs to the cook.

Iowa's Rural Hospitals Aren't Closing, They're Slowly Disappearing

 

The hospital in Clinton isn’t closing. But something important is disappearing.

MercyOne Clinton Medical Center stopped scheduled labor and delivery services in May 2026. Women can still get prenatal care, see their doctors, and have tests done in Clinton. But when it’s time to have the baby, they’ll need to go somewhere else.

Hospital officials blamed rising costs, staffing shortages, and insurance payments that don’t cover the full cost of care.

Clinton isn’t alone. Rural hospitals are quietly losing services. Birthing centers are closing. Patients are forced to go to bigger hospitals farther from home.

It’s like a grocery store that stays open but stops carrying your favorite snacks. First, the bakery disappears. Then the meat counter. Then the pharmacy. The sign is still out front; the lights are on, but it’s not the same store anymore.

That’s increasingly what rural healthcare looks like in Iowa.

Iowa Has a Cancer Problem—and Nobody Can Explain Why

 

Iowa has a cancer problem.

The state has the second-highest cancer rate in the country. From 2018 through 2022, it averaged 499 new cases for every 100,000 people. The national average was 449.

If you packed 100,000 people into a football stadium, 50 more Iowans would get cancer than the average American crowd.

Only Kentucky has a higher rate.

Here’s what should really bother Iowans. Cancer rates have been dropping across much of the country, but Iowa is going the other way.

The 2026 Cancer in Iowa report estimates 21,700 Iowans will be diagnosed with invasive cancer this year—6,400 will die from it. Five years ago, the state estimated 18,900 new cases.

Iowa is getting older, and cancer is more common as people age. Researchers know that. That’s why cancer rates are adjusted for age, making it possible to compare Iowa fairly with younger states.

Even after that adjustment, Iowa is still near the bottom of the pack.

Researchers know which cancers are driving the numbers. Figuring out why is proving much harder.

Melanoma is one of the biggest problems.

Clinton’s $20 Million Data Center Deal: Gift, Bribe, or Just Business?

 

Twenty million dollars.

That’s the number getting everyone’s attention in Clinton.

A company wants to explore building a massive data center outside of town. In the middle of all the talk about electricity, farmland, noise, and water comes the sweetener: $20 million for a new athletic complex.

Basketball courts. Ball fields. Exercise facilities. Community rooms.

Clinton has talked about this project since 2017.

Just a few months ago, city leaders were discussing a $10 million to $16 million facility. Mayor Scott Maddasion said taxpayers might have to vote on a referendum to help pay for it.

Then QTS entered the picture. Suddenly, Clinton wasn’t talking about asking taxpayers for the money. Someone else might write the check.

Sounds pretty good. Maybe too good. Because companies don’t hand cities $20 million for the fun of it. QTS isn’t sitting around worrying about where Clinton kids are going to play basketball next winter.

They want something. The question is what?

Some Clinton residents are calling the $20 million a bribe. That’s a loaded word. Legally, there’s no evidence it’s a bribe. But you can understand why people say it.

Imagine your neighbor wants to build a giant factory next to your house. You complain about the noise, traffic, and what it might do to your property value. Then he says, “By the way, I’ll build the neighborhood a new swimming pool.” You might really want the pool. But you’d probably ask a few more questions before grabbing your swimsuit.

That’s where Clinton is right now.

Emelie Ritchie Concert Orchestra Des Moines 1911

(Colorized image from the Des Moines Register. August 13, 1911)

The Emelie Ritchie Concert Orchestra, a part of the 25-piece Des Moines Womens' Orchestra, toured Kansas and Nebraska in the summer of 1911 under the management of the Midland Lyceum Bureau.

Girl's Orchestra From the I.O.O.F. Orpahns' Home in Mason City

(From The Sioux City Journal. May 18, 1911)

The girl's orchestra from the I.O.O.F. Orphan's Home in Mason City played a benefit concert in Sioux City on May 18, 1911. Mrs. George M. Kellogg of Sioux City raised the money to pay for their instruments.

Jerry Mathers Who Would Have Guessed The Beaver Was From Sioux City, Iowa

Like most Hollywood stars born in Iowa, Jerry Mathers spent little time there. He was born in Sioux City in 1948. His family headed west while television was still figuring out what it wanted to be.

Jerry stumbled into show business almost by accident. A photographer spotted him and suggested modeling. Soon he was showing up in commercials and magazine ads. Before he turned ten, he’d worked with Bob Hope and appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry.

 

Not bad for a kid from Iowa.

 

Then came a casting call for a new television show.

 

The producers needed someone to play Theodore Cleaver. Everybody called him Beaver. They weren’t looking for a child actor who could recite lines like a machine. They wanted a kid who felt real.

 

Jerry got the job.

 

That simple decision turned him into one of the most recognizable faces in television history.

 

Leave It to Beaver wasn’t about cowboys, cops, or superheroes. Beaver worried about homework. He listened to bad advice and got himself into messes that could’ve been avoided if he’d just stopped and thought for ten seconds.

 

Most kids could relate.

Who Killed Edward Kriz at the Hamburg Inn in Iowa City

 

Sometimes the difference between life and death can be as simple as who walks out the door first. That was the case for Edward Kriz, 43, the owner of George’s Buffet, a tavern on Market Street in Iowa City. Kriz closed the tavern shortly after 1 a.m. on November 10, 1962, and headed next door to the Hamburg Inn for a late-night bite with his wife, Bernice, and employee Ralph Thomason.

After finishing their meal, the group left through the back door at around 1:45 a.m. Edward Kriz barely made it two steps out the door before a man wearing a Halloween mask opened fire. Kriz lurched forward, wrestling the man for the gun. Two more shots were fired before he crumpled to the ground.

The shooter fled north toward Bloomington and Gilbert Streets. A witness heard the shots, then saw a man running across Linn Street. He got into what looked like a foreign sports car and sped away.

Kriz was rushed to University Hospital, where he died less than an hour later.

A Different Look At The Founding of Iowa

I had some fun today, and asked ai to make illustrations of Iowa's founding by three visionary artists--Joan Miro, Salvador Dali, and Pablo Picasso.

Joan Miró’s Iowa mural looks like history after chugging three Super Big Gulps and no sleep. Indians, pioneers, forts, riverboats — all bouncing around in bright colors and weird floating shapes. The Mississippi River twists through the whole thing like a giant blue snake that escaped from a Looney-Tunes cartoon.

Nothing makes sense. That’s the fun of it. Miró painted feelings more than reality, so Iowa history turns into this wild, happy dream filled with stars, squiggles, moons, and shapes.

Salvador Dalí’s version looks like the frontier wandered into somebody’s fever dream. Wagons melt. Faces droop. The river stretches forever while creepy skies hang over everything. Even the clocks look exhausted.

The painting feels strange, dramatic, and a little unhinged. Dalí loved taking normal scenes and twisting them into something bizarre. His Iowa looks like Lewis and Clark got lost inside a nightmare and marched west, anyway.

The Murder of Roy Wertz. An Open And Shut Case, Except ...

 

Roy Wertz

Roy Wertz’s murder seemed like an open and shut case. He got into a heated argument with his wife and daughter and began slapping them around. His wife wrestled the gun away from him. It went off, sending two slugs into Wertz’s head, killing him.

Mrs. Wertz admitted, pulling the trigger, so there was no question who fired the fatal shot, or why. Her husband attacked her, then tried to choke her daughter.

Bang. He was dead. They weren’t.

A few days later, the coroner’s jury seemed to agree with her. They determined Mimi Wertz shot her husband with a .32 caliber pistol, adding they believed the “shots were fired in self-defense.”

Case closed. Except.

An hour before the coroner’s jury released its verdict, the police arrested Roy Wertz’s son-in-law, Robert Leeper, 22, on a charge of murder in the first degree.

What was the disconnect? Why did the police suspect Robert Leeper killed his father-in-law? And why didn’t they wait for the verdict of the coroner’s jury before arresting Leeper?

Mormon Trek Across Iowa

 

The Burlington Hawkeye didn’t have a high opinion of the Mormons. They wrote, “Wherever they go and grow strong, there springs up dissensions and violence between them and other citizens. The crimes charged upon them are without number.”

As examples, they pointed to the Hodges brothers, who were involved in the murders of John Miller and Henry Leisi, and to the murderers of Colonel Davenport who took shelter with the Reddens, who were also Mormons.

 

It is easy to understand why they felt the way they did. The main troublemakers in Lee County, and elsewhere in Eastern Iowa and Western Illinois had up to that time been Mormons. 

 

“The Mormons caused bitter rivalries and discord wherever they went,” observed Jacob Van Der Zee. Before being expelled from Illinois, they were thrown out of New York, Ohio, and Missouri. Their home base in Illinois centered on the temple in Nauvoo and some other property they owned in Keokuk and Montrose in Iowa.

 

Benjamin Gue, in his landmark History of Iowa, said the Mormons had to go because “their religion and peculiar social practices were so obnoxious to their neighbors.” Unlike Jacob Van Der Zee, he didn’t talk about the crimes or depredations committed by the Mormons, but more about their religion and polygamy. That’s what he thought other citizens found peculiar about the Mormons.

Things came to a head after the murder of Joseph Smith. In the late fall of 1845, Brigham Young promised his neighbors that the Mormons would leave Illinois, “so soon as the grass would grow, and the water run.” All he asked in return was that the persecution and house burnings would end.

A Double Murder in Low Moor

 

By the time the sun came up over the Lincoln Highway on November 14, 1922, Homer (47) and Rose Brownfield (38) were dead on the floor of their roadside store and the killer was gone.

 

No witnesses. No arrest. No suspect.

 

Just two bodies beside one of the busiest roads in America and a murderer who vanished into the darkness somewhere west of Low Moor, Iowa.

 

People around Clinton County still talk about it more than a hundred years later. A husband and wife running a little highway store. A cold November night. Then gunshots followed by silence.

 

The Lincoln Highway brought strangers through eastern Iowa at all hours.

 

That was part of the problem.

 

By 1922, it had become one of the busiest roads in the country. Cars rattled through Clinton County day and night carrying salesmen, drifters, farm families, tourists, and men nobody knew anything about. Most just passed through.

 

Some didn’t.

 

Homer and Rose Brownfield ran a little roadside store near Low Moor. It sat out in the open country where the road cut through fields and darkness. Travelers stopped for gas, cigarettes, sandwiches, coffee, or directions before moving on.

 

The Brownfields worked long days.

Who Poisoned Ross Ashbaugh in Maynard Iowa?

By the time they dug Ross Ashbaugh out of the ground for the third time, people around Maynard had stopped asking whether he’d been poisoned.

They were asking who had done it.

The Ashbaugh farm sat outside Maynard, Iowa, surrounded by fields that rolled flat into the summer heat. Neighbors noticed everything. Who came by? Who stayed too long? Which marriages looked strained at church on Sunday morning.

Ross Ashbaugh was 44 and built like a man who’d spent his life outdoors. He farmed, raised livestock, and kept the operation running through the endless cycle of planting, feeding, fixing, and harvesting. He and his wife, Effie, were raising two children, Lucile and Edward. By most accounts, Ross wasn’t flashy or loud. Just another hardworking Iowa farmer trying to get by.

Arthur Cahoe had been around the farm for four years.

He was 38, hired help, and close enough to the family that people didn’t think twice about seeing him there. He worked alongside Ross during the day and spent evenings in the house. Over time, neighbors noticed the way Cahoe and Effie acted around each other.

The Chilling 1972 Mystery of Lynn Schuller and the Alligator Named Pogo

 

Lynn Schuller was a 25-year-old mother living the suburban dream in Cedar Rapids with her husband, Keith, and their three-year-old son, Eric. On the surface, the couple enjoyed a picture-perfect life. They’d tied the knot in 1967 and welcomed their first child in 1969. Life was good, right? But as often happens, appearances can be deceiving.

Keith dropped a bombshell on Lynn in 1971. He wanted a divorce. But Lynn wasn’t ready to give up on her marriage and refused. He kept pushing, but she wouldn’t sign the papers.

Things went sideways. Fast. Lynn wrote a letter to her mother, Eloise Tickner, in 1972, confiding Keith had threatened to kill her. But she quickly dismissed it, saying, “He would never do anything like that.” Was it denial? Or wishful thinking?

Fast forward a few months.

It’s August 6, 1972. Keith told authorities: He woke up early, left the house with their son around 7:30 a.m. to take his son fishing, and let Lynn sleep in. When they returned just after noon, Lynn and her bicycle were gone. No note. No trace—just gone.

Who Remembers Wacky Waters Water Park in Davenport?

 

Wacky Waters was the place where your parents handed you twenty bucks at 10 in the morning and basically said, “Good luck surviving.”

Then they disappeared for six hours.

The park opened in Davenport in 1984, off Interstate 80, and for Quad Cities’ kids it quickly became the greatest place on earth besides maybe Aladdin’s Castle at the mall.

Before Wacky Waters, summer mostly meant sweating in somebody’s backyard kiddie pool while mosquitoes carried off small pets.

Then suddenly there were water slides. Not normal water slides either. These things looked like they’d been designed by a man who hated chiropractors.

The Daredevil and Thunderbolt towers were gigantic. At least they felt gigantic when you were nine and wearing jelly sandals. You’d stand at the bottom staring up while another kid shot out the end like a human missile and skipped across the water face first.

Clifford Samuels 17-Year-Old Des Moines Inventor

 

Clifford Samuels and his machine. (Des Moines Register. November 26, 1911)

Most 17-year-olds in 1911 spent their time thinking about school, baseball, or getting into trouble.

Clifford Samuels of Des Moines spent two years building a wireless telegraph machine.

The whole thing cost him seven bucks.

He became obsessed. His grades started slipping. Friends hardly saw him. Family complained he spent all his time reading, fooling with wires, and staring off into space. Sometimes he got so wrapped up in it that he forgot to eat.

And then he spent a day with a Navy officer learning about wireless communication. When he got home, he started building his own machine.

Then came the big test.

After two years of tinkering, reading, and daydreaming, Clifford fired the machine up.

It worked. On the first try.

Clifford told a reporter for the Des Moines Register that it could send messages up to fifteen miles and pick up signals from as far away as three hundred miles. Not exactly small-time stuff for a high school kid in 1911.