:sarcasm:
PuuhLEASE, spare me the revisionist history.
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Gregg, New Hampshire’s senior senator, voted in committee and on the floor for a 1995 Republican budget that envisioned the elimination of the Commerce Department. Of even more concern to black and Hispanic leaders, Gregg battled President Clinton over a request for “emergency” funding for the 2000 census.
“Secretary of Commerce-designate Judd Gregg ’s record raises serious questions about his willingness to ensure that the 2010 census produces the most accurate possible count of the nation’s population,” the National Association of Latino Elected Officials said in a release on Tuesday, the day Gregg was named to the post. “Policymakers and planners at all levels of government rely on these data to make important decisions about their services, such as the number of teachers that will be needed in their classrooms, the best places to build new roads, or the best way to provide job training.”
http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?docid=news-000003024858------
GOP Threatens Legal Action Against Obama for Plan to Oversee 2010 Census
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/first100days/2009/02/12/gop-threatens-legal-action-obama-plan-oversee-census/A Senate committee has scheduled a hearing next month on the potential change. Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee are also pushing for an investigation.
"If the president doesn't acquiesce to our letter, then we will seek the courts," said Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., a ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee,
That in turn sparked an uproar from Republicans, who accused the White House of injecting partisan politics into the census and seeking to cut out agency professionals in favor of political operatives.
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Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), the senior Democrat on the census
oversight subcommittee, said that while the funding level in the House bill is
"great news," the "Republicans created this emergency" by failing to
support a "less expensive, more accurate census plan." Congress
tentatively plans to start its summer recess on August 7;
https://email.rutgers.edu/pipermail/dox_nj/1999-July/000182.html------
John Cornyn (TX), the Senate GOP's current campaign chief, told me that "I don't think it's right to play politics with the Census" but added that he hadn't heard in full about his House colleagues' apprehension. The ultimate decision on the issue may rest with another Texan, Kay Bailey Hutchison, the senior Republican on the Commerce panel.
Still, there's only one Republican who would know that: Sen. John Ensign (NV), who's a member of both committees. And he also happens to be Cornyn's predecessor in the GOP campaign chief's post ...
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/02/gregg-confirmation-flashpoint-emerges-as-gopers-decry-white-house-census-move.php------
December 5, 2003
Updated: December 22, 2003
On the same day, however, the Republican staff of the Joint Economic Committee issued a news release claiming that after-tax income went up - and citing Census figures. What the release did not say is that the numbers being quoted were not the official Census measure of after-tax income, but an obscure, unpublished "experimental" measure that (among other things) does not take account of income from capital gains. The JEC Republicans had even issued a different release earlier in the day, saying that after-tax income was down, and laying blame on the Clinton administration.
Analysis
There was little comfort for Republican political hopes in the income and poverty figures released by the Census Bureau on September 26. They showed that 1.7 million more Americans fell into poverty in 2002, while income of the typical household declined by $500. And while tax cuts had clearly eased the pain some, for the typical household it was not enough -- even after-tax income declined by $310.
But that did not stop House Republicans on the Joint Economic Committee from putting out a news release claiming Census figures showed tax cuts had produced an after-tax income gain of $249. "This is the first increase in after-tax median income since 1999," said the committee's vice chairman, Republican Rep. Jim Saxton of New Jersey. Without the Bush tax cuts, Saxton said, "there is no doubt that middle income households would have suffered reductions in take-home pay in 2002."
Actually, middle income households did suffer reductions in take-home pay by every measure that the Census bureau published. It publishes 16 different measures of before- and after-tax income, some of which attempt to count such things as the value of Medicare or the paper profit from rising home values. All 16 went down in 2002, including definition 1b, the bureau's official measure of money income minus federal, state and local income taxes.
The Republican release was based on an obscure statistic not included in the official publication, "table RD-1", which Census calls "experimental." It is a less comprehensive measure than definition 1b, as it does not attempt to count income from capital gains or losses (actual profits or losses from sale of property such as real estate, stocks or bonds). Since 2002 was a poor year for the stock market, ignoring capital gains and losses gave a more favorable picture than did the official after-tax income measure.
Footnote: Before they dug up the RD-1 statistic, JEC Republicans issued a news release minimizing the decline in median household income and laying blame for it on the Clinton administration. It focused on Census definition 14, an after-tax measure which counts as income such non-money items as the value of school lunches and employer-sponsored health insurance. Even that measure went down $133, but the draft release quotes Saxton as saying this was "essentially unchanged, with the apparent decline falling within the margin of error."
http://www.factcheck.org/census_says_income_is_down_but_some.html
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