Gomers: What's going wrong

JOB LOSSES: As the economic recession took hold, Iowa lost 46,000 jobs - 35,000 of them in manufacturing from December 2007 to July 2009, according to the Iowa Policy Project's annual State of Working Iowa report. The loss in manufacturing jobs equals 15 percent of the job base in that sector. The silver lining, of sorts, in the report was that Iowa working families are still better off overall than most elsewhere in the country. Bankruptcies are well below the national average, and the real estate market is holding up relatively well.

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INSURANCE FACTOR: Looming ever larger is the specter of more and more Iowans without health care insurance coverage and how that may impact the state's economic and social health. A research report issued Thursday by Iowa Policy Project shows that in the two-year period of 2007-08, 9.4 percent of Iowans went without coverage. That's up from 7.9 percent in 2000-01 - an increase of nearly 19 percent. The national figure during that period was 10 percent, indicating a troubling trend for Iowa, which generally has fared better in other social and economic indicators compared to the rest of the nation. The figures are based on a survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau and reflect only part of the current recession.