{"id":398,"date":"2012-05-22T20:44:00","date_gmt":"2012-05-23T00:44:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2015-11-29T09:40:01","modified_gmt":"2015-11-29T14:40:01","slug":"counting-flush-toilets-to-advance-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jeremy-wu.info\/?p=398","title":{"rendered":"Counting Flush Toilets to Advance Democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"
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About 3 million households are randomly selected and asked question 8b in the American Community Survey (ACS) every year:<\/div>\n
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“Does this house, apartment, or mobile home have a flush toilet?”<\/div>\n
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The Census Bureau collects the survey data and reports the statistical summaries.\u00a0 However, a few Congressmen recently cited this question as an example of how ACS invades our privacy and violates our constitutional rights.\u00a0 The House of Representatives passed a bill last week to eliminate funding for the ACS although the Census Bureau cannot publish my or your personal response to the question until 72 years later.\u00a0 Strong laws are already present to protect our personal privacy.<\/div>\n
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Questions about flush toilets first appeared in the 1940 census.\u00a0 There were originally 5 choices about the availability of shared or private use of indoor flush toilets, indoor non-flush toilets, outdoor toilets, or no toilet at all. Progress over time reduced them to today\u2019s one question.<\/div>\n
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Will we miss the flush toilet and ACS data?\u00a0 You bet.<\/div>\n
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Plumbing data are still essential components for the development of public assistance for housing and fair market values; public health officials use the data as an indicator of areas in danger of ground water contamination and waterborne diseases. One of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals is to reduce by half the proportion of the world\u2019s population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and sanitation including flush toilets by 2015.\u00a0 We have made tremendous progress in the last 72 years, but much of the rest of the world is not as fortunate as we are in using flush toilets.<\/div>\n
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For those of us who have experienced squatting on a plank above an 8-foot hole to provide biological relief, a flush toilet is an important part of the life, liberty and happiness that we have been pursuing.<\/div>\n
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Eliminating the ACS \u201cwould cause massive disruptions in the federal government,\u201d according to Andrew Reamer, a research professor at the George Washington University Institute of Public Policy.\u00a0 The Washington Post describes the House action \u201camong the most shortsighted measures we have seen in this Congress.\u201d\u00a0 In terms of cost savings, \u201celiminating the ACS is like declining to buy stethoscopes in order to reduce health-care expenses.\u201d\u00a0 The New York Times calls it \u201cknow-nothingness at a new level.\u201d<\/div>\n
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Availability of flush toilets is only one of the important indicators derived from the ACS.\u00a0 In addition to helping to determine how hundreds of billions of dollars in public funds are distributed each year, ACS provides vital socio-economic indicators that collectively describe the current state of the American people and society and measure progress by comparing with past results including demographics, education, disabilities, employment and family \u2013 who we are and where we have been as a people.<\/div>\n
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Among the questions asked in the first U.S. census in 1790 were the number of slaves and all other free persons in a household.\u00a0 These questions are no longer asked because we have outgrown their relevance.\u00a0 One day the question on flush toilets will also become obsolete; it will be replaced by other questions as we continue to evolve and grow as a democratic nation.<\/div>\n
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Making wise use of data and continuing to inform the citizenry promote good governance and have enhanced the American democratic process for more than two centuries.\u00a0 Eliminating rigorous, scientific collection of national data of economic, social, and demographic significance such as the ACS can only degrade the public’s understanding of complex, dynamic trends in our society.\u00a0\u00a0 Without such reliable data, the formulation of public policy would then be based on speculation, conjecture and ignorance which is not in our nation’s best interest.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

About 3 million households are randomly selected and asked question 8b in the American Community Survey (ACS) every year:\u00a0“Does this house, apartment, or mobile home have a flush toilet?”\u00a0The Census […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":680,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[93,95,94],"class_list":["post-398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-democracy","tag-privacy","tag-survey"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeremy-wu.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeremy-wu.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeremy-wu.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeremy-wu.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeremy-wu.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=398"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/jeremy-wu.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":681,"href":"https:\/\/jeremy-wu.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398\/revisions\/681"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeremy-wu.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/680"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jeremy-wu.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeremy-wu.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jeremy-wu.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}