Political Quotes

“here we go again. Sometimes we believe that we have reached a point where people can put politics aside and just do the right thing. But we find ourselves confronted with a bill here today that would simply complicate the count and mess up the census. We find ourselves with a bill being proposed, H.R. 472, that would force a delay in the census of an additional 9 weeks, a disruption which will undermine an accurate count. The 1990 census was the first in this Nation's history to be less accurate than the preceding census. In my own State of California we lost $2.2 billion in funding because of an inaccurate census in 1990. In 1990 about 4.5 million people were counted twice and 8.5 million were never counted. The undercount, of course, fell hardest on the poor, children and minorities. Monies allocated for schools, school lunches, Head Start, senior citizens, all never reached the communities where people were not counted. A recent GAO study concluded that had an accurate counting method been employed in the 1990 census, the State of California could have received $2.2 billion in Federal funds. We have missed out on the sampling, but we can do a better count if we are allowed to just get about the business of doing it and not put on an extra layer of work by local municipalities who do not have the resources and who do not want to do it. Take the politics out of it. Let us all be the Americans that we say we are.”