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3 comments:
A bit off subject but...
Just as a matter of intellectual curiousity
With political strength of a state based upon Congressioanl House seats
Number of House seats based upon cnsus.
Gerrymandering in states such as Texas use the existence of citizens of color to recieve funds from the Federal gov. but marginalize them in terms of political strength and civil rights. They also divert funds that are meant to help those citizens into schemes to keep tax rates low for wealthy while delivering service to them and not any of the "others".
In past census rethuglicans insisted upon actual physical count and disallowed statistical methods of extropulating population since that usually would mean ( a goal and policy of thugs) people of color get undercounted and they can use this undercount to further short change those communities.
So a question.
If large proporition, and how high a proporition would be required, of Texas residents did not fill in the census forms and were not counted would Texas then be penalized by loss of political clout becuse of remaining static or lossing House seats for lack of enumerated residents?
Espiacially those that reside in caucasian dominated districts.
Would another side benefit would be the weakening of gerrymandering since with fewer seats districts would have to be drawn that de facto would be more equitable? Uncounted residents would in reality would still have voting rights but because of lower counts and other limitations districts would include more voters then shown on census forms. Would this weaken gerrymanded districts?
Couple this with the financial pain of loss of Federal funds while still being held to provide mandated services.
Idle curiousity of alternative scenarios.
K - got some follow up reading. The Brookings Institute's Robert Shapiro did an analysis of many of the issues you raise and suggests that the insertion of the question about citizenship (leading to an undercount) would hurt red states more than blue states:
"The damage of such an unprecedented undercount will not be distributed evenly or randomly across the states. As we noted, 12 states with disproportionately large undocumented populations will bear the greatest burden when it comes to losing seats in Congress, led by Nevada, Texas, California, New Jersey, Arizona and Florida. While every state has students and parents in arrears and people with outstanding warrants, cuts in federal funding based on Census data also will not be distributed evenly across the states. That’s because most of $800 billion per-year in such funds involve programs for low-income Americans, such as Medicaid, school lunches, and the S-CHIP program. The distribution of those funds across the states is based on their shares of all poor households, so the states with the most at stake are those with above-average shares of poor people."
Here's the full article: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2018/03/30/trump-census-harms-red-blue-states/
The question I have is what level of participation of a census boycott would be neede to seriously punish states like texas?
At this time with thuglican games the incidental damage is such that the cost of oppression coupled with political heft to claim special funding supplements is acceptable.
At what level does it become seriously punitive.
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