NewGeography.com blogs

The next official Census isn’t till 2010, but Election Data Services is already predicting considerable impacts on Congressional representation.

Things will be getting bigger in Texas, with four added seats, as well as Arizona, with two. Six states—Florida, Georgia, Nevada, Oregon, South Carolina, and Utah—will increase their federal delegations by one district each.

On the opposite end, Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania will all relinquish one seat, with Ohio appearing to lose two.

While the redistricting process is in the distant future, it should prove interesting to see how the 2010 Census will change the seating arrangement in Washington.

Bloomberg.com reporters Mark Pittman and Bob Ivry are reporting a running total of the money the U.S. government has pledged and spent for bailouts and economic stimulus payments. The total disbursed through February 24, 2009 stands at $3.8 trillion; the total commitment is $11.6 trillion. The Federal Reserve is providing the largest share at $7.6 billion, followed by the U.S. Treasury $2.2 trillion and FDIC $1.6 trillion. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and support for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, combined with purchases of student loans – bailout money that comes closest to directly bailing out Main Street – total only $760 billion – less than 7 percent of the total.

The national debt currently stands at $10.8 trillion — versus an authorized limit of $12.1 trillion.

Last week, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner got into a tiff with the rest of the world (denied by President Obama) by telling them that they should spend at least 2 percent of their GDP on their own stimulus packages.

The U.S. commitment of $11.6 trillion equals 81 percent of U.S. 2008 gross domestic product (GDP). The $787 billion fiscal stimulus is 5.4 percent of GDP. Just the two-thirds of the stimulus that represents new spending (one-third is tax cuts) is 3.6 percent of GDP. Here’s what financial institutions in various countries got from U.S. taxpayers by way of the AIG bailout:

In about a year, the next U.S. Census will be upon us. However, one group participating in the survey is already driving some lawmakers nuts.

In February, The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) signed a partnership with the Census Bureau to “assist with the recruitment of the 1.4 million temporary workers needed to go door-to-door to count every person in the United States.”

While the bureau currently has partnerships with more than 250 national organizations from the NAACP to TARGET, ACORN’s past allegations of fraud have raised the most concern.

The organization – a non-partisan group of low-and moderate-income people – came under fire in 2007, when several paid employees were alleged to have created more than 1,700 fraudulent voter registrations. In 2008, another worker in Pennsylvania was sentenced for creating 29 phony registration forms.

The census is used to “determine distribution of taxpayer money through grants and appropriations and the appointment of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives” and lawmakers do not want any fraudulent computing.

Spokespeople for both ACORN and the Census Bureau have refuted any suggestion that “any group will fraudulently and unduly influence the results of the census.”

Though doubts still remain, the bureau is now focusing on the more than 1 million applicants for 140,000 census taker positions, which is where assistance from organizations such as ACORN becomes needed.

Government accountability is under attack – as it was during the Bush administration, so shall it be under Obama. Given ACORN’s past reputation, confidence in the census itself could come up for question.

The House of Representatives is debating a 90 percent tax on executive bonus payments made to companies receiving bailout funds. Anything they pass will still have to get through the Senate and past the President’s desk. They are “upset about something they already did,” according to Dan Lungren (R-CA). Congress ignored the opportunity to deal with this back when you and me and 100,000 other voters were telling them not to pass the bailout legislation.

Executive compensation schemes at American International Group (AIG) have been under investigation by the New York State Attorney General, Andrew Cuomo since last fall. He is ramping up the investigation now, given the news over the weekend of new bonus disbursements, to determine if the bonus contracts are unenforceable for fraud under New York law. AIG agreed with Cuomo last October not to use their own “deferred compensation pool” to pay bonuses – and then bargained with executives to make the payments anyway! AIG execs got contracts in early 2008 that guaranteed their bonuses – information that former Treasury Secretary Paulson and current Treasury Secretary Geithner (former President of the New York Federal Reserve Bank) had when they initiated the original bailout.

It’s pretty amazing 1) that taxpayers are bailing out a company that’s under criminal investigation; 2) that Treasury didn’t negotiate compensation schemes before they wrote the first check (like they do with auto workers?); and 3) that the bonuses are a bigger story than the fact that more than one-third of the bailout money was shipped overseas.

This week Reuters is hosting a Food and Agriculture Summit in Chicago. On Tuesday presenters, including leading agribusiness executives and business economists, reported that despite the challenging global economic climate, the U.S. rural economy has weathered the recession better than most sectors due to steady demand for agricultural products, stable land prices and healthy credit lines for farmers".

Jim Borel, a VP at DuPont Co stated that "fundamentally, food demand is there," as "people need to eat," which "helps to stabilize things." According to Reuters such claims were echoed by other participants, including Mark Palmquist, CEO of CHS Inc, who noted that the world keeps "adding mouths to feed," and that "food demand... tends to be pretty insensitive to what the global economy is doing."

While there appears to be some anticipation of stability at large agribusiness corporations, such optimism may be tempered among farmers, who have seen commodity prices drop by 50% or more over the past year. Such drops will create a more difficult business environment for producers. However, there is some hope that the strong prices received by farmers over the past couple of years will make them better able to, as one agricultural official in Wisconsin stated recently, "ride it out for somewhat longer than otherwise would have been the case".