Freedom Line Blog

In our ongoing political debates, leftists can virtue signal all they want, but facts don’t lie.  In this case, the Census Bureau’s facts over the past decade relating to domestic migration illustrate whose policy model Americans prefer:

Facts Don’t Lie, Leftists Do

After compiling three decades-worth of responses to health insurance questions, the U.S. Census Bureau is about to implement a new version that will make it impossible to compare insurance coverage data before and after ObamaCare.

Coincidence?

It gets better.

“An internal Census Bureau document said that the new questionnaire included a ‘total revision to health insurance questions,’ and, in a test last year, produced lower estimates of the uninsured,” reports the New York Times.

In practical terms this means “it will be difficult to say how much of any change is attributable to the Affordable Care Act and how much to the use of a new survey instrument.”

According to the Times, the new survey has been in the works for awhile. But there is no explanation given for why it is going into effect in the same year when millions of Americans are transitioning to the ObamaCare regime. The controversial health law was sold as a way to extend coverage to tens of millions of uninsured Americans. Why would the non-partisan Census Bureau make it impossible for observers to see whether ObamaCare actually achieved its goal?

Whatever the official line, it’s difficult to understand the timing of this development as anything other than a naked attempt to avoid accountability.

Jason Richwine of Heritage and Andrew Biggs of AEI provide an interesting thought experiment about the disparities between public and private employee compensation:

If public employees are underpaid, they ought to get raises when they switch to the private sector. But they don’t, and that fact is telling.

…

According to the SIPP data, the average federal worker shifting to a private job actually accepts a small salary reduction of around 3 percent. Similarly, private sector workers who move to federal jobs don’t take a pay cut. They get a first-year raise averaging 9 percent, well above the raise other workers get when they switch jobs within the private sector.

SIPP stands for Survey of Income and Program Participation, a Census Bureau dataset that tracks tens of thousands of households over several years as they switch jobs.  Using it above, Richwine and Biggs turn their thought experiment into a cold hard fact: Compensation is better in the public sector.

Think that’s sustainable?

The lame duck Congress passed a squealer of an appropriation last Friday: $1.15 billion funding the Pigford II class action lawsuit settlement.  Earlier this year CFIF profiled Rep. Steve King (R-IA), a staunch opponent of this taxpayer-funded giveaway.  As King and others have pointed out, Pigford I & II were initially brought to give black farmers a way to get compensation for past USDA discrimination in farm loans.  To date, however, more black farmers have received payments under the settlement than the Census Bureau has records for.  The result is quite possibly the biggest civil rights litigation scam in American history.

Thanks for picking up the check.

You may not know his name (though you’ve seen it here at CFIF before), but you probably know his work. O’Keefe is the 25-year old renegade conservative filmaker whose undercover exposes of groups like Planned Parenthood and ACORN have revealed institutional corruption on the left.

Well, he’s back. And this time his target is the U.S. Census Bureau. Are the results as damning this time? Judge for yourself:

For my fellow limited government types out there, here’s an idea to save money and get the decennial census done competently: hire postal workers to count heads.  The suggestion comes from one of the Census Bureau’s “seasonal” workers quoted in the New York Post.

I am totally convinced that the Census work could be very easily done by the US Postal Service.

“When I was trying to look for an address or had a question about a building, I would ask the postman on the beat. They knew the history of the route and can expand in detail who moved in or out etc. I have found it interesting that if someone works one hour, they are included in the labor statistics as a new job being full.

Yes, you read that last sentence correctly.  Whenever the Census Bureau hires a person for at least one hour of work, they can report to the Labor Department that a new job has been created.  And that’s true even if the one-hour worker gets fired and rehired multiple times – multiple hires equal multiple “jobs.”  Our tax dollars at work.  (Or, is it play?)

With these facts, it seems like the census could be achieved much more efficiently by getting the postal worker on the street to knock on the door, deliver some mail, and casually ask how many people live in the unit.  Since people are already comfortable with their usual postal worker, having them ask the questions would be much more likely to guarantee a response.  And, it would save taxpayers the indignity of funding inflated job creation numbers.