Editorial: 10 minutes on census a benefit to entire state

By The Herald Editorial Board

We’ll be blunt: If you’d like to keep getting more than $16.7 billion each year — of the federal tax dollars that you pay, by the way — to share among yourself and your 7.5 million fellow Washington residents, then you’ll need to respond this year during the 2020 census that begins its count in April.

That $16.7 billion is the state’s share of an estimated $883 billion distributed annually nationwide, and it flows through more than 50 programs that use Census Bureau data — collected every 10 years — to determine funding levels for those programs in each state, including Medicaid, highway and transportation funding, federal student loans and Pell Grants, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, business and industry loans, Head Start, homeland security grants, Community Development Block Grants, home loans and housing assistance, crime victim assistance, senior meals and other assistance programs and more.

Ignore the reminders to complete your survey and successfully “hide” from the census and that’s roughly $2,200 for each member of a household that won’t be available to support those programs — programs that touch everyone — in Washington.

There’s also the matter of your representation in Congress. The census also determines the size of each state’s congressional delegation in the House of Representatives as 435 House members are divvied up around the country. After the 2010 census, Washington state added a House member and is now represented by 10 representatives. The state has seen modest growth in recent years, but isn’t expected to gain another House member after this census, although Oregon is expected to add one and California may lose one.

-more-

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/editorial-10-minutes-on-census-a-benefit-to-entire-state/?utm_source=DAILY+HERALD&utm_campaign=b2c435e323-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d81d073bb4-b2c435e323-228635337