Fill out your census form. It's important.
Washington,
Nov 9, 2009 -
By Lynn Westmoreland
It will only take 10 minutes, and it’ll benefit our state for 10 full years.
It’s time for the 2010 U.S. Census, and a form will be coming to your family soon.
Fill it out. It’s important.
I chair the House Republican’s Census Task Force, a group I founded this year to keep an eye on the Census Bureau and the Obama administration as they undertake this huge and crucial government function.
The group’s work has already paid dividends. Even before news shows aired tape of ACORN workers giving advice on tax evasion and child prostitution, the Census Task Force was fighting to keep the group from partnering with the Census Bureau. We won that battle – the Census Bureau director has barred ACORN -- and we’ll continue to keep an eye on outside groups that partner with the government to aid the count.
Most important, the task force successfully pushed the administration to forswear “sampling,” which uses mathematical formulas to estimate how many people live in a certain area in lieu of an actual head count.
The person-by-person count is essential to this once-a-decade process because that’s what the Constitution calls for, it’s what federal law requires, and it’s the best way to keep the administration from distorting the count for partisan gain.
That’s where you come in. If every American fulfills his or her duty to stand up and be counted, we’ll save the federal government millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of dollars. When people don’t send in their forms, the government has to hire legions of counters and partner with outside groups to go find them. This is where dubious “guess work” can come into play.
In addition to doing a favor to yourself as a federal taxpayer, you’re also assisting Georgia.
The census determines how many seats each state gets in the House of Representatives. Right now, Georgia has 13 members, but because of the significant growth we’ve experienced over the past decade, we’re in line to gain a 14th seat.
Beyond adding to our state’s clout in Washington, the population numbers affect your family directly. The federal government uses funding formulas based on census figures. That’s about $400 billion a year divided up to all the various departments, and it’s vital to a fast-growing state such as Georgia. We must receive our fair share of those dollars for schools, veterans, health care programs, transportation, etc.
It is on transportation, particularly in metro Atlanta, where Georgia really deserves a larger slice of the pie. The metro Atlanta economic engine is the horse that pulls the cart in our state and, oh by the way, it also fills federal coffers with tax dollars. But as we all know, our jammed traffic threatens to choke our growth – as well as wasting time and gas, polluting the air and stoking our tempers.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that filling out your census form will shorten your commute or single-handedly solve any one of Georgia’s challenges. But in order to have a successful effort overall, we can’t have any missing links in the chain. We need neighborhood leaders to push census response, and we need our Georgia mayors to communicate with the Census Bureau so that residents of new housing developments – which might not be on the radar of the federal government – get counted too.
Take a few minutes to fill out your form, and you’ll perform an act of good citizenship for your nation and your state. You matter, so make sure you count.
