WHITING, Iowa — The cafe was selling hot biscuits and coffee for $1.50, but most of the red vinyl seats were empty, as they often are. Bert McCandless, 73, glanced around glumly.
"This place used to be full. Now look at it," he said. "Iowa's losing people like crazy." With a grumble he added: "What ... is there to keep them here?"
That's a question state legislators are trying very hard to answer.
Iowa suffers from an alarming brain drain: It loses more of its young, single, well-educated adults than any state except North Dakota. In search of bigger cities, hipper crowds and warmer weather, young Iowans flee in such numbers that demographers predict the state will face a drastic labor shortage within two decades.
Desperate to keep the state's future from bolting, the Republican leadership in the state Senate is proposing trying to entice young adults to stick around by abolishing the state income tax for everyone under 30.
About a dozen states, including California, exempt low-income elderly from filing tax returns. New Mexico offers a free ride to anyone who makes it to 100. But Iowa would be the first state in the nation to stop taxing young adults.
The proposal, introduced two weeks ago, would save the average twentysomething about $12 a week -- and cost the state treasury an estimated $200 million a year. The bill's sponsors say that's money well-spent if it persuades a few thousand more bright, ambitious young Iowans to stick around.
"The ones like my 16-year-old daughter who say, 'I'm getting out of here as soon as I can' ... well, there's probably nothing we can do to keep them," conceded Sen. Jeff Lamberti, a Republican legislative leader. "But we really have to get serious about this problem."
It's a problem that has been building for decades, not only in Iowa, but all across the Great Plains. And civic leaders have proposed all manner of responses.
At least eight small towns in Kansas are offering free land to any family willing to try living on the prairie, where the winters can be fierce and the cultural attractions sparse, but where a brand-new four-bedroom house costs less than $150,000 and a teacher who has 18 students in a class is considered overworked.
The rugged counties of northwest North Dakota are trying reverse psychology. Locals have set up a website that describes the frozen frontier as too brutal for the typical suburban softy to handle. "Do you have what it takes to be a 21st century pioneer? Most don't," the website taunts. It goes on to admit that residents are looking to recruit 5,000 hardy new neighbors and asks whether "you just might make the cut."
