Comment on a colleague’s work #1

The Lone Star State blog makes a good point in their post, “Census is the answer for the prays of How to get the government to allocate money to the states.” They claim that the census is an important factor, the most important factor, to come up with a reasonable way to allocate, or give, money to each state. The census allows the government to count the population and make a assessment on how much money each state should get according how many people it is to cover.

As The Lone Star State blog says, this money would go towards building and up keeping highways and schools and improve medical care. We have a census every 10 years so that as population changes the government can change in order to accommodate these changes.

The Lone Star State blog is right in saying that ideally the census is great, but in actuality it falls short due to the fact that people don’t turn in their census papers and therefore many people go uncounted. These uncounted people not only skew our numbers but they skew them enough to effect the money the state gets. As they said, Travis County is behind the nations average, and it is right to assume a lot of this has to do with the fact that there are a large number of college students. College students, especially freshmen and sophomores, go back home during breaks and aren’t there all year long. They are also more preoccupied with school and don’t care enough to turn their papers in. There are also a lot of homeless people that are unaccounted for, and illegal immigrants who fear being exported.

Nationwide we miss a large number of people; we just need to try our best to find other ways to count as many people as we can. Everyone needs to be aware of this issue and to understand that the government just wants to count us for our own benefit.