Lately the Iowa Legislature has been trying to find a way to solve a
basic problem: how to keep young people from leaving the state. Right
now, Iowa's “brain drain” is second only to North Dakota's. The
Legislature is toying with a simple idea, getting rid of state income
tax for everyone under 30. This proposal was front-page news in
California, where most of Iowa moved in the 1960's.

Let me translate the economics of this plan. The State Legislature
proposes to offer every young tax-paying Iowan a large delivery pizza –
or its cash equivalent, about $12 – every week of the year. But smart
young Iowans know this is only an average figure. The more you earn,
the more state income tax you save.

If ever there were an incentive to earn your first hundred million by
the time you're 30, this would be it. Never mind that South Dakota,
right next door, charges no income tax no matter how old you are.

Of course, there are serious questions about financing this tax break,
which could cost as much as $200 million a year. The best bet would be
to require young people to spend their dole on the Iowa Lottery.

Iowans are resolutely practical about such proposals. One state
legislator, quoted in The Minneapolis Star Tribune, said: “Let's face
it. Des Moines will never be Minneapolis.” He might have added that
Council Bluffs would never be Kansas City. Another Iowan, when asked
what the state needed to keep its young people, said, “An ocean would
help.” This is the kind of big thinking Iowa has always been famous for.

But $600, the average yearly state income tax for Iowan 20-somethings,
is not enough to undo decades of social erosion. The problems Iowa
faces are the very solutions it chose two and three generations ago.
The state's demographic dilemma wasn't caused by bad weather or high
income taxes or the lack of a body of water larger than Rathbun Lake –
an Army Corps of Engineers reservoir sometimes known as “Iowa's ocean.”
It was caused by the state's wholehearted, uncritical embrace of
industrial agriculture, which has depopulated the countryside,
destroyed the economic and social texture of small towns, and made
certain that ordinary Iowans are defenseless against the pollution of
factory farming.

These days, all the entry-level jobs in agriculture – the state's
biggest industry – happen to be down at the local slaughterhouse, and
most of those jobs were filled by the governor's incentive, a few years
ago, to bring 100,000 immigrant workers into the state.

Business leaders all across Iowa have been racking their brains to
think of ways to spur economic development. But nearly every idea
leaves industrial agriculture intact. That means a few families living
amid vast tracts of genetically modified soybeans and corn, with here
and there a hog confinement site or a cattle feedlot to break the
monotony.

People love to blame the death of America's small towns on the coming
of Wal-Mart, but in Iowa, Wal-Mart is just a parasite preying on the
remains of a way of life that ended years ago. Every farming crisis –
they seem to come at least once a decade – has shaken a few more
farmers out of the business, consolidating land holdings and decreasing
the rural population that actually depends on small towns to do
business in. The complex connection between town and country that
characterized the state when I lived there has long since been broken.

There is not enough life in the small towns of Iowa to keep a young
person, and there is no opportunity on the land. The state faces an
excruciating paradox. It can foster economic development of a kind that
devours farmland – the sort of thing that is happening around Des
Moines. Or it can try to reimagine the nature of farming, with certain
opposition from farmers themselves and without any help from the
federal government, which has fostered industrial agriculture for
decades.

I used to joke that Iowa's two leading crops were rural poverty and
crystal meth. But it's not a joke. The fact is that Iowa is a beautiful
state. Minneapolis isn't that far away. Iowa would be a great place to
live, if only the air and the water weren't polluted and you could be
sure you wouldn't find yourself living next to 10,000 sows in a hog
prison. There was a time, well within my dad's memory, when Iowa's
agriculture was diversified and when the towns were rich in a culture
of their own devising.

I grew up in the latter days of such a town, and I find it hard to imagine a better place to have been a kid.