Rep. Jeff Duncan has a plan to help us cope with information overload. His H. R. 1638 would simply eliminate all the data collection that the U.S. Census Bureau does except for the decennial population count. In particular, it would do away with the American Community Survey that has been undertaken in some form since a guy named Thomas Jefferson was president. (And along with it the Economic Census, the Census of Governments, the Census of Agriculture, the mid-decade Census and other information-gathering not explicitly stated in the Constitution.) The House of Representatives voted last year 232-190 to dump the ACS, but the proposal failed to gain traction in the Senate. That probably will be its fate this year as well.This stuff takes very little time to fill out, and just doesn't affect citizens in a negative way, but when you hate government, you want it to do a really crappy job. No better way to get that result than to give them no information to make things better. It frustrates the hell out of me that the party I used to consider myself a member of is such a bunch of retarded assholes.
Together with the Census itself, the American Community Survey used to be done every 10 years, with one of out six Americans required to fill out the "long form." But, as a cost-saving measure, President George W. Bush switched it to a annual survey of one in 38 households. Advantages: cheaper and more up-to-date. The problem, according to Republicans like Duncan (as well Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Ted Poe of Texas who want it to be optional), is that ACS is too invasive.
Not only does it ask 14 pages of questions about how many people in a household are working, details of their commuting habits and their ethnic ancestry, what fuels they use to heat their dwellings, and whether they have computers and internet access at home, but also, OMG, how many toilets they have. The latter seems particularly to perturb the survey's foes.
The ACS data, massive amounts of it, provide insight on a whole range of economic issues. Without it, publishing economic indicators simply isn't possible. Says Ken Prewitt, the former director of the U.S. Census who is now a professor of public affairs at Columbia University, there would be no unemployment rate and no report on the gross domestic product. There also wouldn't be information about how to distribute federal grants, 70 percent of which are now guided by ACS, according to the Brookings Institution.
Thursday, May 2, 2013
Willfully Stupid
Republicans really, really hate government surveys:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
We had a similar thing happen up here a couple of years ago when our Conservative government cut the long-form census. It's keeping in line with their dislike of most things scientific.
ReplyDeleteI would say that they do such things because it's much easier to spin anecdotal evidence than empirical evidence ("I know two people who stood in long lines at the DMV. Therefore, it should be shut down because it's obviously a waste of money."). Another step in dumbing down the electorate.