On Friday, in my diary "Economic apartheid... with MAPS!", I used the NYT census/google map feature to take a look at some census tracts in Washington, DC around the seat of government. A lot of the surrounds there showed remarkably strong economic growth this past decade, most notably Census Tract 58, with an estimated 1,429 households, which had a median household income of $107,208, for a 105% increase since 2000.
Needless to say, most of the rest of America has not been doing nearly so well. In fact, it's like we're in a whole different country. I just wanted to start off the week by reminding folks of that a little more specifically.
Chicago
Chicago has long been known as America's "Second City", the defining city of the industrial heartland. So how has Chicago been doing this past decade? Not well, it turns out, and it's nearby suburbs even worse:
Chicago's 9% drop in income is just inside single-digit territory, same as it's northern suburban county. But the two counties to the west are well over the mark at 13% and 11% down from the end of the Clinton Era. Things are not looking well in the heartland. Maybe someone should tell the White House? Or at least Rahm Emmanuel?
Dallas
Well, the industrial heartland has been hurting for decades now. We don't really do anything about it. That would be too much "activist government". Like Europe. Or even like America when we built the Interstate system and went to the moon and stuff like that. The Sunbelt is where it's at nowadays, everyone knows that. And nothing says "Sunbelt" like Dallas, right? Even had a TV show named after it. So how's Dallas been doing this past decade? Oh my:
Dallas County's 16% drop in income almost makes Cook County's 9% drop look like paradise! And Plano County's 12% drop is not exactly cheery, either. At least the other two counties in the picture here are only single-digit losers, and Fort Worth's Tarrant County is a mighty big place, too, so its 8% decline would almost pass for cheery news hereabouts. That's only half of Dallas's rate of decline, after all.
After Dallas, just about anything is bound to look good by comparison, and Bellingham/Seattle, a high-tech powerhouse for three decades now would be just the place to go looking, don't you think? Check it out on the flip:
After a recent breakup, a friend of mine had an awkward conversation with her new ex. It began with this difficult question – “I know you’ve got a new man, but is he a good man?”
Some things are just hard to answer. So when I read in the New York Times last Friday that the job market was brightening, I knew better than to question the statement. Out loud, at least.
In my head, I can hear the rewording – “I know you’ve got a new job, but is it a good job?” And actually, I think this difficult question has to be asked, and answered. The American economy has made some strides in recent months, presumably in response to the stimulus. However, there is still work to done. Although the country added 162,000 net jobs in March 2010, almost one-third of these jobs include temporary Census jobs. Furthermore, of the people who remain unemployed, the number of those considered to be long-term unemployed – meaning that they have been seeking work for 27 weeks or more – has risen to 44.1%.
The State of the Union speech given last Wednesday by President Obama was a major event and the focus of several polls. Though Gallup reported that, historically, support for the President is not affected by the State of the Union, a before-after survey conducted by CNN shows that the address bolstered viewers confidence in the administration. How long this boost will last, and whether it can be generalized to the entire public, remains to be seen. Another significant upcoming event receiving increasing attention is the decennial census which will be conducted in March.
STATE OF THE UNION
Just before President Obama's State of the Union speech, CNN conducted and released a poll to gauge which issues were most pressing to Americans, and what they were expecting from the President's address. It is not news that people have grown increasingly pessimistic about the direction of the country, and CNN's poll showed over the past year there has been a steep decline in those expressing that the country is headed in the right direction:
•67% in February 2009
•63% in May 2009
•52% in August 2009
•49% in January 2010
Last week, Senators David Vitter (R-LA) and Bob Bennett (R-UT) drafted a controversial amendment to H.R. 2847, the Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies appropriations bill, that would add questions on citizenship and immigration status to the 2010 census. The amendment is only the latest in conservatives' efforts to keep undocumented immigrants from the national headcount. Caving to concerns that an immigration question would intimidate some respondents, Vitter and Bennett have now changed their amendment so that it would add a question on citizenship, not legal status, to the 2010 census.
But we still need to fact check them and other conservatives who want to ignore constitutional and census history.
For decades, the census has counted undocumented immigrants and other non-citizens for apportionment and redistricting purposes. The 14th Amendment plainly states that representatives should be distributed to states according to a count of the "whole number of persons in each state." The Constitution doesn't limit the count to citizens or even voters-it makes clear that to be counted is a right of all persons residing in the United States, regardless of immigration status.
Vitter and Bennett are worried about re-apportionment of Congressional seats and want to drive a wedge between winners and losers, claiming that counting the growing numbers of undocumented immigrants and non-citizens in blue states will unfairly take away Congressional seats from citizens in red states. States like Iowa and Pennsylvania are likely to lose seats in Congress after next year's count, while "illegal-magnets" like Arizona and Florida are set to gain. But let's be clear on this issue: some states will lose seats next year, and some will gain. This is how our political system has always worked; it just isn't true to say that counting non-citizens and the undocumented distorts this process. States receive representation based on how many people live there, not through unfairly and artificially excluding residents in other states.
There's also a significant economic dimension here.
The April employment report is still giving me nightmares. Employment in retail trade declined by 47,000; jobs in manufacturing plummeted by 149,000; Construction employment fell by 110,000; the professional and business services industry lost 122,000 jobs.
And 66,000 Americans found work helping to prepare for the 2010 Census.
Of course, these weren't the only citizens to obtain employment last month. What's more, the new Census positions aren't even permanent. But amidst the carnage of unrelenting layoffs, there's something about those newly hired Census employees... I can't help wishing there were more of them.
I thought about the Census workers during the utterly absurd controversy over whether the Republican party would officially urge the Democrats to change their name to the "Democrat Socialist Party." If the Democrats were truly willing to think big - to be informed by the best traditions of European social democracy, or even the New Deal - the federal government would be hiring a lot more than 66,000 employees during a time of tremendous economic need.
We may not need thousands more people take the Census (although more employees might help prevent the troubling undercounts that plagued past Census efforts). But we have no shortage of other urgent public needs. The time has come to think about hiring people to address them directly, going beyond inadequate stimulus funding to launch a genuine public jobs program.
"Guaranteed public jobs paying more than the minimum wage would permanently and automatically stabilize the economy, swelling the ranks of public workers in recessions and shrinking them when private jobs become more abundant. Instead of punishing the working poor most severely in downturns, as the system does now, the government would redistribute the costs of recession so that all taxpayers would share the burden as a public obligation."
A permanent public jobs program, as Greider proposes would indeed be thinking big. But a even temporary program of sufficient scale would make an enormous difference in a broken economy. After all, the Democratic party is apparently bound to be called "socialist" regardless.
Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution requires that an "actual Enumeration" of the U.S. population be made every ten years -- a task now referred to as the decennial census. By statute, the census must encompass "population, housing, and matters related to population and housing." The U.S. Census Bureau conducts the census by mailing census forms to households seeking basic demographic information about their residents, and follows this up with personal visits if the forms are not returned.
However, experience has shown that this methodology results in a greater undercount of minorities than of the population as a whole. For many years, a dispute has raged over how to deal with this problem, including whether to use statistical sampling to supplement the data obtained by the Census Bureau through its traditional methodology. Conservatives have vociferously opposed sampling, arguing that it is prohibited by the Constitution's textual requirement of an "actual Enumeration." Hard questions are raised by this, given the constitutional text, but a new issue has arisen over accuracy and the 2010 census that should not be hard to resolve at all.
According to recent press accounts, the Census Bureau intends to alter the data it receives from legally married same-sex couples by reporting them as "unmarried partners." The euphemism that the Census Bureau uses for turning accurate data into inaccurate data is "editing." The Bureau has changed the responses of same-sex couples before. Back in 1990, the Bureau "edited" the responses of same-sex couples who reported themselves as married, usually by changing the sex of one of the partners to report them as an opposite-sex couple. (We could not make this stuff up; you can read about it right here on the Bureau's own web site.) Throwing a bone of sorts to gay men and lesbians in 2000, the Bureau decided that instead of reassigning the gender of some same-sex spouses, it would "edit" the responses of same-sex couples who reported themselves as married by changing their relationship status to "unmarried partners." Apparently, that's the Bureau's idea of progress. At any rate, as two of the Bureau's own researchers (who had access to the "unedited" data) reported, this "editing" distorted the data for both sets of households -- married and unmarried same-sex couples. As these researchers put it:
It is clear from the examination of these unedited data that households which are identified as 'married couple' same gender households are a distinct group from households which are identified as unmarried partner same gender households. By combining these households . . .we are distorting the picture for both of these groups of households.
What a surprise!
In 1990 and 2000, gay and lesbian couples could not legally marry. But that is no longer the case. So when the Census Bureau "edits" the data this time, not only will it once again distort that data, but it will also inaccurately report legally married couples as "unmarried." This is a rather ironic turn of events coming from an agency that proudly proclaims itself to be "the leading source of quality data about the nation's people."
The Bureau asserts that the so-called federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) requires this distortion of the facts. But does it really? DOMA states that:
In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, or of any ruling, regulation, or interpretation of the various administrative bureaus and agencies of the United States, the word 'marriage' means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife, and the word 'spouse' refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife.
Certainly a very good argument can be made that by merely (and accurately) reporting the responses received on the census form, no determination of the "meaning of any Act of Congress, or of any ruling, regulation, or interpretation" of a federal agency is involved. (Moreover, federal law empowers the Secretary of Commerce to undertake the census "in such form and content as he may determine.") And whether or not reading DOMA to require the alteration and falsification of data by the Census Bureau would violate the "actual Enumeration" clause of Article I, Section 2, the constitutional text plainly expresses the Framers' intent that whatever the census counts, it should do so accurately and apolitically. The "editing" of legally married same-sex couples into "unmarried partners" is anything but accurate and apolitical.
So far, the Census Bureau's plan to report inaccurate data when it conducts the 2010 census has not provoked an outcry from conservatives who have previously made so much about the Constitution's "actual Enumeration" requirement. Given their reverence for the constitutional text, shouldn't conservatives be demanding that the Census Bureau give this country an "actual Enumeration" of legally married couples? In any event, we expect no less from the Obama Administration. Indeed, this week, in announcing that the director of the 2010 census would report to the Secretary of Commerce (a response to Republican concerns that the census would be run out of the White House), a spokesperson for President Obama declared that "The president wants to ensure that the census conducts a fair and accurate count." With the Census Bureau admittedly planning to do something else entirely when it comes to legally married gay and lesbian couples, isn't it time for the Administration to step in?
As originally ratified, the Constitution's "actual Enumeration" requirement infamously counted slaves as "three fifths" of a person. That constitutional text was consigned to oblivion by the Fourteenth Amendment. Even so, it seems that our country hasn't fully learned its lesson about the issues of human dignity involved when it comes to counting human beings.
Originally posted at Text & History. Judith E. Schaeffer is proud to work for the Constitutional Accountability Center (CAC), a law firm and think tank dedicated to demonstrating how the Constitution upholds progressive outcomes.
The fight for 2012 is here. Beltway media insiders rejoice!
Who's it going to be? Spunky Sarah? Moneyed Mitt? Holy Huckabee? Some dark-horse candidate flying under the radar? One thing is for sure: While the media clamors for every tiny detail in the looming battle for the Republican presidential nomination, the real fight for 2012 is taking place right before their very eyes.
The people of Colorado will be voting on an amendment to the state's constitution on November 4 that could radically alter the nature of abortion and even in vitro fertilization within the state. Amendment 48 would change the definition of "person" to include "any human being from the moment of fertilization." The new definition would apply to three different sections of the state constitution covering the right to due process and the right to sue.
The Denver Post reports that the amendment has 103,000 valid signatures, well more than enough to make it on the ballot. The proposed amendment has already been cleared of a court challenge that it was invalid because it covered more than one subject. Not so, said the jurists. It also has the support of Colorado Springs based Focus on the Family, the Catholic Church and appears to be the new issue du jour for the right wingers.
Wording on the Amendment is quite interesting. The new definition is not, well definitive. A person would include what the article referred to as the "pre-born" but would not be restricted to that definition. Thus the eminently non-human corporate persons would retain their right to sue and be sued.
The US Census Bureau released data this week on the millions of Americans who moved between 2005 and 2006. The Census tables highlight demographic characteristics, including sex, race and ethnicity, income, educational attainment and other qualities.
Considering that persons must re-register at every new address to be eligible to cast a ballot, the effect that mobility can have on the enfranchisement of millions of Americans is enormous.
STATE BLOGS
