Media Center - 2024 Archive

Job quality provisions in federal initiatives for infrastructure improvements and energy systems will help redirect Iowa’s construction industry and lawmakers toward high-road policies with long-term benefits for Iowa. A new report from Common Good Iowa identifies trends that feed low-road practices toward workers and communities, and threaten a thriving construction industry in the state.

Iowa’s job market is in a slow-growth mode as Governor Kim Reynolds and legislative leaders suppress worker rights and advance counterproductive policies that hold back our economy.

Political showmanship won’t obscure the reality of deficits, debt and inequity when the U.S. House Ways & Means chair stages a pro-Trump Tax Cut hearing at the Iowa State Fair.

It might not be this year, or next, but Iowans in the near future will realize the destructive course set by Governor Kim Reynolds and the tax-cutting leadership of the Legislature.

Forget the adage: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” In the Iowa Legislature, it’s different: “We broke it, so let’s break it some more, and then make sure nobody can fix it.”That in short is the picture of tax-cut proposals gaining steam in Iowa.

Legislators are elected for a two- or four-year term that expires. Lawmakers in office today have no rightful claim to tie the hands of their successors. The same goes for voters.

Despite encouraging wage gains in the last couple of years, 1 in 6 working households in Iowa cannot meet basic needs on their earnings alone. Over half of single parents are falling short, according to the latest edition of the Cost of Living in Iowa from Common Good Iowa.

Iowa's most lucrative business tax credit gave away nearly $85 million in 2023 to companies, mostly to very large companies and much as checks to companies that paid no state income tax. It's part of a longtime trend, but reforms may paint a different picture in 2025.

The two-part income-tax elimination plan introduced in the Iowa Senate would (1) decimate state services such as education and health care, (2) tilt Iowa's overall tax system further in favor of the rich, and (3) defy fundamental democratic principles by demanding two-thirds approval of any cleanup of the tax-cut mess.