Free Republic

Ben Wattenberg died this week at the age of 81. He gave me my first job in Washington, as his research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank. (I returned to AEI as a fellow a few years ago, my office just a few doors down from where Ben used to work.) Ben was one of the last star pundits of what might be called the Old Order, before cable news and the Internet transformed the landscape. When everyone was rushing to CNN to shout at each other on "Crossfire," he launched a PBS show called "Think...

A security guard was critically injured in a shooting at the U.S. Census Bureau headquarters in Suitland on Thursday evening. Prince George’s County fire department spokesman Mark Brady said that an adult male who was standing guard at a gate to the facility had suffered at least one gunshot wound to his upper body. Brady said the victim’s condition was “extremely critical.” At about 7:45 p.m., roughly two dozen military-clad officers with rifles entered the Census campus and began sweeping through parking garages and lots. It was unclear which police agency the officers represented. Around the same time, an announcement...

Illinois had the biggest decrease in population according to a new report from the Census Bureau. Between July 1, 2013 to July 1, 2014, the state lost 9,972 people. On the other end, Texas saw the largest population increase adding more than 450,000 people during that time. Cook County saw a very slight decrease in population. It’s one of four counties with a population of more than 1 million to experience a decrease. Others include industrial counties like Wayne County, Michigan; Cuyahoga, Ohio; and Allegheny, Pennsylvania. The rate of people leaving Cook County for other counties has been increasing since...

The federal government is considering allowing those of Middle Eastern and North African descent to identify as such on the next 10-year census, which could give Arab-Americans and other affected groups greater political clout and access to public funding, among other things. The U.S. Census Bureau will test the new Middle East-North Africa (MENA) classification for possible inclusion on the 2020 census if it gets enough positive feedback about the proposed change by Sunday, when the public comment period ends. Arab-Americans, who make up the majority of those who would be covered by the MENA classification, have previously been classified...

One in five young adults—ages 18 to 34 years old—live in poverty, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. “More millennials are living in poverty today, and they have lower rates of employment, compared with their counterparts in 1980,” the Census states. “One in five young adults lives in poverty (13.5 million people), up from one in seven (8.4 million people) in 1980.” …

... Shaheen, when asked by Breitbart News about a recent study from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) that found 71 percent of all New Hampshire jobs since 2000 have gone to both legal and illegal aliens rather than New Hampshire citizens, ducked for cover. “My understanding is that’s a study sponsored by a right-wing organization,” she replied. When Breitbart News noted that the study is based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau and other government sources—and includes no data from non-governmental sources—her communications director Harrell Kirsten abruptly called an end to the press conference inside the local Democratic...

A field supervisor in the Census Bureau’s Denver region has informed her organization’s higher-ups, the head of the Commerce Department and congressional investigators that she believes economic data collected by her office is being falsified. And this whistleblower — who asked that I not identify her — said her bosses in Denver ignored her warnings even after she provided details of wrongdoing by three different survey takers. The three continued to collect data even after she reported them. ... Census is broken up into six regions. Cheating has already been proven in the Philadelphia region. And with this whistleblower’s letter,...

In 2009, in the earliest weeks of President Barack Obama‘s administration, the White House made the controversial decision to take the unprecedented step of moving the Census Bureau from control of the commerce secretary over to the White House ahead of the decennial 2010 census. Conservatives sounded alarm bells. “It takes something that is supposedly apolitical like the census, and gives it to a guy who is infamously political,” said Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT) of then White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. “Requiring the Census director to report directly to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is a...

If you simultaneously accept estimates published by the Census Bureau and the Chief Actuary of Social Security, then illegal aliens who misused Social Security numbers to work illegally in the United States in 2010 earned more on average than American women did. The Office of the Chief Actuary published an analysis in April 2013 entitled, "Effects of Unauthorized Immigration on the Actuarial Status of the Social Security Trust Funds." It included this question and answer: "Question: Of the unauthorized workers paying OASDI (Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance) taxes, what is the average level of earnings upon which the taxes are...

Last week, the New York Times reported that the Census Bureau would be significantly changing the questions and methods it uses to determine who has health insurance. The redesign is an attempt to address some of the flaws in the current design that have long troubled the agency. A working paper from the Census Bureau had found that it provided an “inflated estimate of the uninsured” and was prone to “measurement errors” that diminished the reliability and usefulness of the measure. The timing of this change could hardly be worse. The massive coverage provisions of the health care reform have...

In 2009, within the first few weeks of taking office President Obama, moved control of the Census Bureau from the office of the Commerce Secretary to the White House ahead of the 2010 Census. Republicans were irate, thinking it was an effort to politicize the 2010 headcount itself. Unfortunately, Republicans were thinking small. As the New York Times reveals, the Census Bureau “is changing its annual survey so thoroughly that it will be difficult to measure the effects of President Obama’s health care law in the next report, due this fall, census officials said.”Not difficult. Virtually impossible: “The changes are...

Buried deep on the website of the U.S. Census Bureau is a number every American citizen, and especially those entrusted with public office, should know. It is 86,429,000.That is the number of Americans who in 2012 got up every morning and went to work — in the private sector — and did it week after week after week.These are the people who built America, and these are the people who can sustain it as a free country. The liberal media has not made them famous like the polar bear, but they are truly a threatened species.It is not a rancher...

WASHINGTON — The Census Bureau, the authoritative source of health insurance data for more than three decades, is changing its annual survey so thoroughly that it will be difficult to measure the effects of President Obama’s health care law in the next report, due this fall, census officials said. The changes are intended to improve the accuracy of the survey, being conducted this month in interviews with tens of thousands of households around the country. But the new questions are so different that the findings will not be comparable, the officials said. An internal Census Bureau document said that the...

When government pays for something, it gets more of it. For the past five years, Congress has been pushing “emergency” subsidies for long-term unemployment, and, not surprisingly, we’ve been getting more joblessness — a fact some have been working overtime to conceal. When President Obama took office, there were 2.7 million who had spent at least three years jobless. Now, 4.1 million fall into that category, demonstrating that government “help” isn’t always an improvement. Yet congressional Democrats still want more. On Tuesday, they demanded House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp bring up legislation to extend unemployment benefits indefinitely....

Since 1993, the Census Bureau has made available detailed data about federal government expenditures in its Consolidated Federal Funds Report (CFFR). The 2012 report will be the last one. Through the CFFR website, the public had access to such data as federal expenditures made at the county level for programs such as Medicaid, Social Security, and Medicare as well as for more obscure federal spending programs. How much did the federal government send to Autauga County in Alabama for a hazardous materials training program? That data was available, but now it is concealed. The CFFR states: The U.S. Census Bureau...

[Article featured link in an email newsletter by the US Census Bureau, Census Information Center, Jan Figart] Millions of African Americans live in communities that lack access to good jobs and good schools and suffer from high crime rates. African American adults are about twice as likely to be unemployed as whites, black students lag their white peers in educational attainment and achievement, and African American communities tend to have higher than average crime rates. These issues have been persistent problems. Jobs are essential to improving African American communities. Increased employment would help people in these communities lift themselves out...

New Yorkers can be forgiven for shock at the newspaper headlines last week informing them that millions more of them were “near poor” or “low income.” They might relax a bit on learning that the “root cause” is simply new definition of poverty from the Census Bureau. Indeed, under the Census definition, a family in New York City is “near poor” if it has full medical insurance and an annual income below $77,000. (In Oakland, Calif., the figure is $88,000!) The Census report actually put nearly half the US population as “low income” — and news stories typically implied the...

They drive cars, but seldom new ones. They earn paychecks, but not big ones. Many own homes. Most pay taxes. Half are married, and nearly half live in the suburbs. None are poor, but many describe themselves as barely scraping by. snipShe has one BlackBerry and two cars (both Buicks from the 1990s), and a $230,000 house that she, her husband and two daughters will move into next week.Combined, she and her husband, a janitor, make about $51,000 a year, more than 200 percent of the official poverty line. But they lose about a fifth to taxes, medical care and...

The Census Bureau admitted Tuesday that it had “artificially inflated the number of same-sex couples” in the United States, initially reporting a number that was about 40 percent higher than what it now believes is accurate. The original data published by the 2010 Census set the number of same-sex households in the U.S. in 2010 at 901,997, including 349,377 same-sex married couple households and 552,620 same-sex unmarried partner households. But the Census Bureau said in a Tuesday conference call with reporters that it has revised these numbers downward “because Census Bureau staff discovered an inconsistency in the responses in the...

The first few requests were tolerable. A Census Bureau worker would knock on John and Beverly Scott's door and ask them to fill out an American Community Survey. The McKinley Park couple would politely decline. But as the days passed, the visits became more frequent and the requests more urgent. Some evenings, the doorbell would ring at dinnertime, then again at 10 p.m. "I'm generally a nice guy. I didn't want to shut the door in her face," John Scott said. "I said, 'I'm not going to answer your questions.' She kept saying, 'You've got to, you've got to.' I...