Memo to The Donald: Get 2020 census right
ONE of the first things the Obama administration tried when it got into office in 2009 was to get control over the Census Bureau.
Census was reporting to Congress. The White House wanted it to report directly to then-White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.
The fact that the Census Bureau was a top priority shows just how important it is.
President Obama’s power grab failed. And while I’m not suggesting that President-elect Donald
Trump pull the same trick, I would recommend that he get quickly up to speed on the bureau, which not only compiles economy data but also determines how much federal tax revenue each locality gets and how many representatives each state elects to the House.
The US Constitution mandates that a national census of the population occur every 10 years — a de- cennial census. Obama’s first term started just a year before the 2010 census was to take place.
Trump has more time. But work on the 2020 Census has already begun, and big changes are being made that could bite Trump and the Republicans on the backside.
I broke the story years ago that the Census Bureau was having difficulty getting Americans to respond to its surveys, and that led to cheating — survey takers fraudulently filling out forms on their own. After I exposed that, the response rates on all surveys suddenly tumbled and, without the cheaters, the bureau has been having trouble meeting quotas.
Census officials are anticipating the same problems with the 2020 decennial, so they are making adjustments — namely, there will be a lot more guesstimates made without any guarantees that these will be accurate.
According to recent documents from the Census Bureau and the Government Accountability Office, the bureau plans to substantially cut back on door-to-door surveying and, instead, use the internet, the Post Office and other means to determine who is living where.
The bureau thinks the 2020 sur- vey will cost $5.2 billion less than the last one (an estimate the GAO questions), but the accuracy could be called into question. There will also likely be worries about fraud because many of the conclusions will be drawn through “imputations” — educated guesses.
In fact, fraud could affect the House of Representatives elections for years to come if someone isn’t watching.
During a recent hearing before the House Oversight Committee, which maintained control over the Census Bureau after the Obama-Emanuel caper, a key technology officer for the 2020 decennial admitted that a fraud prevention system won’t be fully in place until just a few months before the polling starts.
“How are you going to test something and go live a month or two after that?” asked one of the representatives on the committee. The Census Bureau representative didn’t seem to have an answer.
The Federal Reserve raised interest rates last week. As I explained many times before, it really had no choice since the financial markets were already raising them.
But here’s the funny thing. The Fed doesn’t have a clue as to what the economy is really doing. Yes, I know that’s been my theme for a long time. But the proof came out again last week.
Days after the Fed rate hike, the New York Federal Reserve Bank lowered its estimate of fourthquarter gross domestic product growth to just 1.8 percent. And it said the first quarter of 2017 will hit only 1.7 percent.
Both are pathetic growth rates and about 0.7 percent lower than the NY Fed had been predicting.
Here’s the scary part. At the same time the NY Fed was cuttingg its estimates, the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank was affirming its own prediction of 2.6 percent growth in the fourth quarter.
Is this any way to run an economy?
It’s hard to win the title of sleaziest politician, but New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has a better chance of winning that than he ever did of winning the presidency.
The guy’s unbelievable. This past week, he and New Jersey legislators cut a devilish deal. A state law would be waived so Christie could profit from writing a book. In return, the obese governor would sign off on a pay raise for state elected officials.
And as so with the Bridgegate scandal — when Christie retaliated against a local politician — the most petty US elected official decided to also get revenge, against newspapers, because they haven’t been nice to him. Christie proposed that the state should not have to take out ads to announce certain legal actions. This would cut into newspaper revenues and cost jobs. OK — here’s my proposal. Any publishing house that decides to buy Christie’s book should know that people like me will urge a boycott. At least one copy will be bought — by me. I will then reveal in my column whatever juicy things he writes about. And after they read about it for free, nobody will need to buy the book. The publisher will take a hit.
And what about the legislators who go along with this arrangement? I’ll publish their names. So they probably will get kicked out of office pretty quickly and won’t enjoy their tainted raises for long.