Word: censuses
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Which is more stressful--your summer as a prison guard or running the Census Bureau...
...organizing group ACORN announced March 22 it was disbanding. Since 1970 the group had fought to raise the minimum wage, counseled low-income homeowners and registered the poor to vote. In September a video sting operation run by conservative activists hit the group hard: Congress cut its funding, the Census dropped its partnership, and donations plunged...
This is the season when we are reminded that you can safely and reliably count just about anything other than people. Census comes from the Latin censere, which, tellingly, does not mean count so much as estimate, and 2,500 years ago in Rome, people were already squirrelly about being estimated. The penalty for refusing to reveal how many people were in your household, how many slaves, how much livestock, was forfeiting it all and becoming a slave yourself. The Bible tells the story of God getting so mad at King David for ordering a census (granted, it was because...
David's plague may have deterred census takers for many years, but when the Founding Fathers invented American democracy, they realized that if you are going to have government by the people, you need to know who and where they are. The founders stuck a Census requirement in the Constitution so that every 10 years, the young, stretchy country would recalculate which states got how many lawmakers. They worried that a state might try to inflate its population to increase its representation, so they cleverly arranged that the first Census would also be used to spread around the costs...
Accommodating, if not promoting, multiple ethnic identification seems especially important at a time when a growing number of Americans - including their President - have mixed-race parentage. For our children's race, my wife and I simply write in Mixed for want of any better option on the census form. But in the 2020 census, we'd like them to be counted more precisely as progeny of both the Anglo race and the Latino raza...