Treasury full of IOUs

The Iowa Treasury is not overflowing with surplus owed to the affluent. The Iowa Treasury is overflowing with IOUs. The obligations the people of Iowa have made to maintaining a prized society are many, but those promises have been discounted by successive Republican governors and legislative enablers.

Our higher education system now balances its precarious budgets on the backs of student tuition rather than state aid. Per pupil funding for public schools is so far in arrears to inflation it’s laughable. The state settled a lawsuit to make it provide health services to poor and needy children. Volunteers are tapped to mow in our state parks. Now wonder donations to the “chickadee checkoff” have plummeted, it’s a sign of lost faith in an increasingly futile cause.

Pay the debts owed to our mission for a good life for all. I refuse to let some future wanderer find in Des Moines the foundations of the Capital and only the words, “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair.”

John Lawrence Hanson

Marion