Lower taxes would help Iowa avoid a worker shortfall when the Baby Boomers retire, magazine publisher and former presidential candidate Steve Forbes told a crowd at the West Des Moines Marriott last week.

“Lower the income tax, and you’ll see people coming to this state in droves,” he said, adding: “With technology, geography doesn’t matter anymore. You have to take down the artificial barriers.”

Forbes magazine recently ranked Des Moines fourth on its list of “Best Places for Business,” based on the cost of doing business, cost of living, educational attainment and crime rate.

Forbes, who was the keynote speaker at Broker Dealer Financial Services Corp.’s national sales conference, said the American economy gets no respect, despite how much it has grown in recent years,

“Our growth in the last four years exceeds the entire Chinese economy,” he said, adding: “We’ve created more jobs in the last four years than Western Europe and Japan combined, and there is plenty of juice to keep our economy going for many years.”

Corporate America has more cash on hand than any time since the 1960s, Forbes said, and stock buybacks are at a high level. He said American households have done a good job of saving, bucking the notion that they are fraught with debt.

“There isn’t a nation in the world that wouldn’t trade their problems for ours,” he said.

As for the problems the nation does face, Forbes returned to an idea that he has been championing for more than a decade: the flat tax.

“Washington spends like a drunken sailor, which is an insult to drunken sailors,” he said. “At least drunken sailors are spending their own money.”

We should be rewarding things like risk-taking, saving and hard work, he said, not punishing it with over taxation.