Newt was on a local radio station at the end of last month. He is promoting some book, but it is interesting. He rips into Obama and the Reverend Wright issue, but at the end he talks about sacrifices during WW2 and current gas prices.
Please note the morning talk show is openly Republican. At the end they ask Newt if McCain can win this year. The answer was a little surprising.
He’s mostly making the point that there are blatant examples of bureaucracy and governmental waste that could be dealt with by using less money and more smarts. It does seem a bit off that the Census is going to do heads-down data entry in 2010. We should be beyond that.
We should, but we’re not because it benefits conservatives to have an inaccurate, crappy head-count census. The big expenses racked up in the census occur from trying to find and count the homeless and immigrants. We could guesstimate for far less and end up with a far more accurate count, but that would result in more urban, poor, minority districts.
I’m guessing Newt’s “solution” is to completely privatize the census but still require a physical headcount, which will probably result in an even less accurate count that further overrepresents wealthy white folks, because those are just the people it’s easiest to count.
Beyond that, I think he’s just picking a convenient paper tiger that Republicans can hold up as another example of that bloated, pesky Federal gov’t. We don’t have a massive deficit because of anything his party supports, like Bush’s tax cuts and the War in Iraq, the real problem is THOSE FAT CATS RUNNING THE CENSUS!
I think it’s hilarious Gingrich thinks anyone gives enough of a shit about what the census cost to vote for Republicans over the issue.
Well, his father-in-law DOES own an Annheuser-Busch distributorship… And he is a war hero… so…
Yes to all of the above. :)
While the census is a pretty minor issue, Gingrich does have a point. I’ve been an adult for the last two and have never seen or done anything related to it. Nothing ever showed up in the mail, nobody came by where I worked, etc.
Meanwhile, the census bureau can already tell you with pretty good accuracy what the population of the country is right now. Why are we gearing up every ten years for an old fashioned “head count” that costs a lot of money and doesn’t actually count everyone?
Because the people who aren’t counted are disproportionately Democrats?
Not everything has to be viewed as a political issue.
I’d bet money that the 2010 census results will be at 1-2% variance from what the estimates will be.
Some kind of complete count every 10 years is mandated by the Constitution. They don’t have to do it in any particular way, but they have to do it.
Yes, but the census has been one since… well, probably since the very first. The census determines the apportionment of legislative seats, you don’t have to be especially swift to see the ramifications.
I’d bet money that the 2010 census results will be at 1-2% variance from what the estimates will be.
Well, the “official” undercount, the gap between the census and local gov’t estimates, was below 3% for the 2000 census, but that’s still over 6 million people. NYC alone lost over half a million people in 2000.
So it’s a complete coincidence that Republican politicians generally support the counting methodology that misses more Democrats, while Democratic politicians support the methodology that counts more Democrats?
The census determines how much representation various locations get. It’s inherently political.
Glenn, do you have a source for your 3%/6 million/half a million in NYC figures?
No, you are wrong. The census results are used politically to redraw the the district maps, but minor errors don’t have a huge impact on that.
I can’t believe we’ve gotten to the point where everything is a damn political conspiracy.
And I never said I was against the census, I said I was against the “old fashioned head count” approach because there are a lot of other tools available now.
Half a million undercounted in NYC was from 1990, not 2000 (although I seriously doubt it’s gotten better).
Here’s a link to a report from 2005 by someone who appears to be in the Census Bureau discussing over/undercount vis-a-vis 2000. The introduction discusses several attempts to determine to what extent there was an over/undercount, and mentions multiple figures, ranging from an undercount of 0.3% to an overcount of 0.7%. If I read the intro right (and I didn’t dig into the main paper), the final, and presumably most accurate revision was the A.C.E. Revision II, which estimated an overcount of 0.5% - i.e. the 2000 census overcounted people slightly.