Though Minnesota doesn’t allow same-sex couples to marry—and a measure is on the ballot in 2012 to ban marriage for same-sex couples in the state constitution—703 female couples and 627 male couples have married in other jurisdictions. Marriage for same-sex couples is legal in six states, the nation’s capitol and two sovereign nations.

One-third of Minnesota’s same-sex couples that reported being married are raising children under the age of 18.

Iowa, where same-sex marriage has been legal for two years, has as many married couples as Minnesota: 1,373. Wisconsin has 1,194 married same-sex couples, North Dakota has 146, and South Dakota has 175.

The Census Bureau downgraded the number of same-sex couples nationally who are married from earlier estimates because of data problems.

“We understand how important it is for all groups to have accurate statistics that reflect who we are as a nation,” said Census Bureau Director Robert Groves in a statement on Tuesday. “As scientists, we noticed the inconsistency and developed the revised estimates to provide a more accurate portrait of the number of same-sex couples. We’re providing all three—the revised, original and ACS estimates—together to provide users with the full, transparent picture of our current measurement of same-sex couples.”

The Census data shows that 1 in 5 same-sex couples in the United States identified themselves as married.

Colorado’s poverty rate hit 12.3 percent in 2009-10.

An estimated 617,000 Coloradans live in families with incomes less than the federal poverty level. For a family of four, that’s $22,350 this year; for a single person, it’s annual income of less than $10,890.

From a press release issued by the Colorado Fiscal Policy Institute:

Colorado’s budget enacted earlier this year contained deep cuts to education, health care and other services that support struggling families as well as the investments that are the foundations of the state’s ability to create jobs and promote prosperity over the long term. Policymakers will continue to face tough decisions about how to fill budget shortfalls, even if voters in the November election approve Proposition 103, a measure that would increase revenue to stop irresponsible cuts to education. Taking a balanced approach that includes revenue instead of a cuts-only approach will be crucial to keeping more families from falling through the cracks as well as maintaining education, health, public safety and other services that are so crucial to Colorado’s future.

“We need to step up our efforts to help Coloradans weather the recession – not make it harder. Our state needs to take a balanced approach to budgeting that includes revenues. Not only will that help struggling Coloradans, but it will improve our economy in the long run,” said Christine Murphy, executive director of the Colorado Center on Law and Policy, the parent organization of the Colorado Fiscal Policy Institute.

The Colorado Fiscal Policy Institute issued a fact sheet today analyzing some of the significant figures for Colorado.

Nationally, women have been especially hard hit by the economic climate. In Colorado, childhood poverty is also on the rise, with more and more kids going hungry.

While an anti-gay-marriage initiative will be on the ballot in 2012, a policy that would surely turn many same-sex couples away from Minnesota, some of the state’s communities are embracing the growing number of such couples within their communities.

Minneapolis has 3,831 couples, according to the Census, or 23.43 same-sex couples per 1,000 households. It lagged behind only San Francisco, Seattle and Oakland among of cities over 250,000 population. Its place among major cities hasn’t change much over the last three decades. It was fourth in the 1990 Census, fifth in 2000 and in the American Community Survey conducted between 2004-2006, the city placed third.

St. Paul has 1,346 such couples, or 12.13 same-sex couples per 1,000 households, ranking it 24th among cities with a population greater than 250,000. That put it just behind Los Angeles.

Minnesota came in at 33rd among the states for same-sex couples per 1,000 households. It was bested only by Illinois among Midwestern states, ranking just above Indiana and well ahead of Iowa (47th), where gay marriage is legal. Wisconsin was 40th, and South and North Dakota were 50th and 51st, respectively.

Minnesota saw an increase in same-sex couples of 50 percent over 2000.

In Minnesota, the top city of any size with the highest concentration of same-sex couples was Golden Valley followed by Minneapolis, St. Louis Park, St. Paul and Richfield.

In the U.S., the Census reported 901,997 same-sex couples or 7.7 per 1,000 households.

The numbers are prompting some communities to tout their acceptance of same-sex couples as a positive attribute. Pine City did not make the top five in Minnesota, but Pine County did — coming in third behind Hennepin and Ramsey counties. Some community boosters there have seized on those numbers. Pine City, home to 3,100 residents and located about an hour north of Minneapolis, hosts East Central Minnesota Pride, a LGBT pride picnic held each summer. The parade has garnered attention nationally for being one of only a handful of small-town pride events in the nation. And, the Minnesota State Fair Foundation named it a winner for the 2011 Community Pride Showcase.

“This event is one of the ways that the small town GLBT community can help to bring harmony to us all no matter where we live in this great state of ours,” said Dennis Burns, owner of DB Signs in rural Pine City, in a statement about the recognition. “I urge everyone to attend the picnic next summer.”

Nathan Johnson, Pine City’s city planner, noted that Pine City’s proximity to the Twin Cities, as well as its openness, has contributed to an increase in same-sex couples choosing to locate in the area.

Another reason for the concentration of gay couples in the Pine City area might be that the city lives up to its motto: “North. Nice and close.” People are coming here from the Twin Cities area, primarily, because of the great quality of life. The town is home to a health food store, gyms, a community theater and an arts center—not to mention the recreational aspects of the Snake River and nearby lakes. One can buy anything from hummus to sushi here.

And while Minneapolis has been named the nation’s most gay-friendly city, Pine City has evidence of a community that embraces gay residents as well — such as East Central Minnesota Pride.

Bottom line, as reported recently in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the increase since 2000 in the number of same-sex partners reflects three changes: More gays and lesbians in the area; more choosing to live together; and more of them willing to identify themselves as gay.

True in the Twin Cities. True in Pine City.

Fifty-six percent of same-sex couples live in Santa Fe or Bernalillo Counties. About two-thirds are female couples and one-third are male couples. About one-quarter of the couples are raising children and three-quarters are not.

Only Vermont, Massachusetts, California and Oregon have higher proportions of same-sex couples, according to the analysis.

New Mexico offers no legal recognition for same-sex couples. A Public Policy Polling survey released in early July showed that forty-two percent of voters indicated they thought gay marriage should be legal, while 49 percent thought it should be illegal. However, when asked about civil unions and gay marriage, 37 percent said gay marriage should be legal, 31 percent said civil unions should be legal and 30 percent favored no legal recognition for same-sex couples at all.

The study explains that the simplified poverty thresholds used by federal and local governments (for example, to evaluate welfare eligibility) are determined simply by tripling average food costs. While the Census Bureau uses a somewhat more complex calculus, with 2009 revisions meant to account for things like geographic variation and shifts in the costs of food (downward) and household goods (upwards), it doesn’t end up with terribly different numbers from the simplified thresholds, as is evidenced in the most recent Census figures (Microsoft Excel file) establishing poverty guidelines. For example, as of this year, the simplified poverty threshold puts the poverty line at $22,350 for a household with two parents and two children; the Census says it’s $22,162.

So if the Census Bureau uses a mind-bogglingly complex formula to determine what level of income makes a person or family poor, and the rest of the federal government just multiplies the average cost of food by three, and they both end up with about the same number, why isn’t that an accurate measure of poverty in the U.S.? The Cooper Center report explains:

“Many families near the poverty line (household incomes 100-150% of FPL) rely on public assistance programs, indicating that we might better view the current poverty line as a measure of deprivation, not of the income necessary to be truly self-sufficient.”

That issue — economic self-sufficiency — is at the heart of the study, and its findings are startling. Although the report only evaluates Virginia households, its conclusions clearly have relevance throughout the country, given that, as the report states, Virginia has the 39th lowest poverty rate and the 42nd lowest unemployment rate in the country, and as statistics available elsewhere attest, Virginia is right in the middle of the country in terms of cost of living (24th lowest out of 50 states, plus D.C.).

The study breaks down average monthly household expenses in the state of Virginia and finds that to meet basic household expenses, the average household needs to earn approximately 200 percent of the federal poverty line. Put more simply, one needs to make at least twice what the federal government calls the poverty line in order to live in Virginia. And again, given Virginia’s relative economic health and perfectly average cost of living, the same is presumably true across the country.

Because the poverty line as determined by the federal government is a sliding scale based on household size, and census data on household income does not break things down by household size, it’s a bit difficult to wrangle statistics together meaningfully. But an extremely rough estimate based on the Census thresholds and the fact that the Census puts the median household size in the U.S. at 2.6 people would put the “median poverty line,” as it were, in the neighborhood of $16,500 — a bit north of the halfway point between the two- and three-person household poverty lines.

Based on the Cooper Center conclusion that people really need to be making about twice what the government says they need to be making just to get by, if you double that $16,500 to get an estimate of how much the average family really has to make just to break even, you end up with $33,000. Census data (PDF) indicate that an even 36 percent of households in the U.S. have an income of less than $35,000 a year. So to bring it all together, if the Cooper Center’s study can indeed be applied to the rest of the country, it’s possible that as many as a third of all American households aren’t pulling in enough income to break even without assistance — a far cry from the already-high 14.3 percent poverty rate officially published by the Census Bureau.

Although these are, again, very rough estimates, at least one figure cited in the Cooper Center’s report indicates that they may not be terribly far off: the Federal Reserve’s most recent Survey of Consumer Finances shows that a full 30% of Americans are what the Federal Reserve dubs “asset poor” — that is, they don’t have the savings to pay for retirement or children’s education funds, nor do they have enough money set aside to weather crises such as job loss or medical emergencies. These results are from 2007, before the U.S. economy went into freefall. The survey is conducted every three years, so the results from 2010’s survey may eventually paint an even grimmer picture once they are released.

The Census apportions congressional districts every ten years, while state legislatures are generally in charge of redrawing the districts based on those apportionments. The population of the United States is now 308,745,538, and each congressional district will average 710,767 persons.

Texas, where Republicans have a supermajority in the House and Senate and hold the governor’s mansion, gained four new House seats with the population growing by 20.6 percent in ten years. However, the growth broken down by race will be released in February — the Voting Rights Act could mean that some of those seats have to be drawn with a majority of Hispanics that have accounted for much of the recent growth.

Florida gained two seats, where Republicans also have a supermajority in both legislative chambers and hold the governor’s mansion. Amendment 6, limiting the power of the legislature to redraw congressional districts, passed in the November elections, but it is being challenged in court by Reps. Corrine Brown (D-Fla.) and Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.)

Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, South Carolina, Utah and Washington all gained one seat.

New York and Ohio lost two seats each, representing the longstanding decline in growth in the Rust Belt. Iowa, Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Jersey and Pennsylvania all lost one seat.

The reapportionment process will also have implications for the 2012 presidential campaign, as the Electoral College is based on the number of congressional districts in each state. In 2008, Barack Obama beat John McCain by 365 electoral votes to 173. With today’s reapportionment, McCain would have picked up six seats and Obama would have lost five.

The number of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives if based on population size, but Michigan has seen a significant decline in population over the past decade.

Once the numbers are released, it will lay the ground work for lawmakers to begin the process of redistricting. Because both chambers of the Michigan legislature are controlled by Republicans — as is the governor’s office — lawmakers are expected to redesign the state districts to force sitting Democrats to challenge each other.

MLive.com reports that many expect the districts of Democratic U.S. Reps. Gary Peters and Sander Levin. The two — from the 9th and 12th districts respectively — both share representation in Oakland county.

After the 2000 census, U.S. Rep. John Conyers was forced into a primary battle with Rep. Lynn Rivers. Conyers won the primary.

A Census worker in Minneapolis. (Flickr/Adria.Richards)

The enumerators — the door-to-door Census takers — have long since finished. The final quality assurance representatives, technology specialists, accountants and phone operators are packing up. Contracts are expiring for workers on retainer. Thus, with a whisper, the decennial United States Census is ending.

[Economy1] Washington completes this Constitutionally required count of each man, woman and child in the country every ten years, so that Washington knows how to apportion Congressional seats and trillions of dollars in federal funds. That also means Washington engages in a direct-employment program every ten years. In 2010, it could not have come at a better time — in the midst of the jobless “recovery” following the worst recession since the Great Depression. With six workers competing for every opening and Congress waffling on providing additional aid to the jobless, the Census came barrelling in — a coincidental, accidental stimulus, stuffing billions of dollars into hundreds of thousands of empty pockets for dull, easy work.

At times, the Census seemed to be the only bright spot in a grim economy. In May, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the economy added a shocking 431,000 jobs — but 411,000 came from the Census. Without it, the economy seemed to sputter. In July, with Census workers packing up, the Labor Department noted that the economy lost 54,000 jobs, with private employers failing to make up the 114,000 positions that evaporated with the Census.

It did not act as a panacea. And it might be an inefficient, anarchic undertaking. But at this time, the Census came as a welcome one.

***
Before he started working on the Census, Brad Nelson did electrical work and retail management in Fresno, a city of 500,000 surrounded by industrial farms, right smack in the middle of California. Craig Baltz, now a friend of Nelson’s, had been working for a marine-salvage company out on an island in Alaska before returning to the city to be closer to his family.

But Fresno was in tough straits. The state of California has a high unemployment rate — at 12.4 percent, third only to Michigan and Nevada. And Fresno’s unemployment rate is high even for California. At one point, it drifted above 17 percent. Employment-wise, out of 372 metro regions surveyed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Fresno ranks 365th.

So, in the winter of 2008, Baltz and Nelson decided to apply for Census jobs. “An ex-boss of mine heard about it and was going down to take the test, so I went down with her,” Nelson explains. “I basically stumbled into it, as did most of the people I worked with.” Baltz, similarly,  saw an ad in the paper and applied on a whim. The government hired the two men, who helped open an early Census office about 17 months before the big summer 2010 ramp-up.

At first, just 10 or 20 staffers worked for the Census in Fresno, setting up the phones and helping to hire and train others. “The office was a dump!” Nelson reports. “We had constant water leaks and alarm issues. And, we were right in the area where there was an ongoing gang war. We had to get armed security outside our building.”

But it was work — albeit temporary work. “For instance, there was address canvassing,” Baltz says, “where we’d have to hire a lot of people to go check addresses, then more to check their work in the office. That meant we would hire 20 or 30 clerks in the office, and hundreds in the field. Then we’d fire all of them. Then, a few months later, we’d have another project, and the big roller coaster ride would come again, up and down, up and down. Very few people stayed through the whole time, though we did layoff and rehire the same people over and over.”

Most of the workers Baltz and Nelson encountered had no other jobs. “I’d say very few, a very small percentage, had other jobs,” Baltz says. “People would come for the paycheck. Because of the economy here in Fresno, we had just so many people who were available to work.”

And many were frankly destitute. “Because of the way the Census hired,” Baltz says, “we didn’t even meet or interview people before we hired them. We hired them solely off of their test scores. So, some people would get a perfect score on the test, they’d come in, and they wouldn’t even be able to tie their shoes.” Others were so down on their luck they came in without clean clothes. Some evidently had mental-health problems. One loudly announced he had his gun in his car downstairs, just in case.

But over the course of the Census-taking, the office swelled from a few dozen workers to more than 4,000 — meaning the Census hired the equivalent of one out of every eight unemployed workers in Fresno.

Across the country, offices like the one in Fresno started popping up. The scale of the Census-taking boggles the mind, the method almost silly in its labor-intensiveness. The Census hires workers to visit, in person, every single home, prison, mental institution, ranch, halfway house, marina, homeless shelter and other domicile in the United States. (Consider: The United States is the third-largest country on Earth. And it is just the 32nd most densely inhabited.) Workers update each address, and then the Census sends a form to each one. If a household does not respond, a Census-taker — known as an enumerator, for the Constitutional language — visits up to three times to help.

This is far from the most efficient way to tally U.S. residents. Social scientists and small-government supporters argue that an extensive telephone survey supplanted with some physical counts would do the same job, perhaps more accurately, at a fraction of the cost. And many cost-saving technological advances have failed. In 2000, the Census let respondents answer over the Internet. In 2010, they did not.

So, the Census continues to rely on feet on the ground and knocks on front doors. Counting America this go around required the temporary help of more than 800,000 workers. About 635,000 enumerators visited homes that did not mail in a Census form. A further 59,000 counted people without conventional housing, and 29,000 went to tally up people in prisons, schools and other group quarters. In total, the Census Bureau’s force of enumerators was seven times the number of troops sent for the Afghanistan surge — or the equivalent of the total number of U.S. postal carriers. About 4 million Americans, 3 percent of the total workforce, applied for the jobs.

Beyond the army of enumerators, it also hired a support staff of hundreds of thousands. There were trainers to train the trainers to train the trainers. There were phone operators, technicians, human-resources workers and computer specialists. There were thousands of middle-managers. There was a small army of staffers to deal with complaints from people having their Census data checked.

Paying this staff proved the single biggest cost for the Census, which clocked in millions of hours of work at $10 and $25 an hour. Additionally, of course, the Census made business for businesses. It rented millions of square feet of office space. It bought tens of thousands of pencils. It spent $2.5 million on a Superbowl advertisement.

All that spending meant that the Census has a noticeable and measurable impact on the economy. Measured quarterly, the Census boosted annualized real and nominal gross-domestic product by 0.1 percent in the first quarter of 2010 and 0.2 percent in the second. It reduced GDP growth by similar amounts in the third quarter, even though, last month, Census still flushed $250 million of new government spending into the economy. And it knocked a few tenths of a percentage point off of the April and May unemployment rates, essentially preventing those rates from drifting higher.

The Census actually came in under budget, by about $1.6 billion. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke noted that part of the reason the Census went so smoothly was because of the higher-quality workforce it attracted: Due to the massive number of unemployed persons, the Census attracted more-qualified applicants for jobs. “That highly skilled workforce came up with efficiencies on their own and ideas that were then incorporated community-wide and then system-wide,” Locke said. He noted that a number of Census employees had canvassed for Obama.

***
But the Census remains a sprawling, continent-wide endeavor, and sprawling, continent-wide endeavors mean waste. Stephen Robert Morse built the site MyTwoCensus.com, dedicated to tallying the Census’s monumental inefficiencies. He tracked workers caught throwing out Census sheets, or faking information, or gambling on the job. He watched for senseless spending, and found it everywhere.

“This Census shouldn’t have been done by hand to begin with,” he says. Two years ago, the Census Bureau decided to connect Census employees to an integrated system via hand-held computers, like iPhones. The endeavor, despite the upfront costs, should have reduced the Census workforce by tens of thousands and saved the Census $3 billion. To make the computers, the Census Bureau awarded a $700 million contract to the Harris Corporation. But the system proved, ultimately, unusable.

“So far, it is not as stable as it needs to be,” said the Government Accountability Office’s Robert Goldenkoff. Instead of getting instructions via handheld, enumerators in 2010 got printouts.

“Brazil, in their census, is using proprietary handheld devices better than we are,” Morse sighs. “In the Amazon rainforest.”

The Census also overhires employees, an audit found. For instance, the Census Bureau hired 10,200 temporary employees to do nothing but attend training, and 5,028 temporary employees to attend training and work for less than a day.

Baltz and Nelson, of the Fresno office, saw it firsthand.  “It was the last week of working on the address portion of the Census,” Nelson recalls. “We already had workers out in the field who had completed their area, checking addresses in rural parts of Fresno and in the city. We would let people go once they finished their area, and we told the office higher-ups that we had enough workers to get things done ahead of schedule.

“But the office told me that we had to keep on training workers — even though we knew there was no way we would need them. I asked why we had to do that. The story I was told was because — it was right around the time, just before or just after the elections, where they had just signed the stimulus, it needed to go to create jobs.”

Baltz seconded the story. “We paid $18 bucks an hour, for a 40-hour week, to the trainer. Then all the people in the class were making $16 bucks an hour for a 40-week. That’s $640 a week per person. That’s like $6,000 that we just wasted.”

“‘We’re creating jobs,’ one of the higher-ups told me,” Nelson said. “We thought it was a joke.”

But though it created jobs for hundreds of thousands of workers, the Census hiring program was not designed to best-aid the jobless, and its effect on the economy is actually more moderate than the gross numbers would make it seem. Many Census workers came not from the rolls of the unemployed, but out of retirement. Most were working only part-time, going to school or working other jobs during the day. For that reason, the Census brought down the unemployment rate less than one would expect.

The Commerce Department’s chief economist, Mark Doms, explains: “Given that a lot of these Census workers didn’t work that many hours — it ended up being not a tremendous amount of money relative to the total economy. The GDP impact was not large. Even if we use the multiplier analysis [to see the impact of the infusion of dollars into the economy], you’re still not going to get a very large number,” he says. Moreover, the shot in the arm proved short-lived — helping many in April and May, but fading through the summer.

But even if the impact is hard to measure, for some workers, it was all too clear. Nelson, for one, is now just unemployed.

Poverty declines sharply for seniors. For families headed by single mothers, it declines significantly before tracking back up during the 2000s. The aughts saw a slow rise in poverty for the working-age and children, as well — the first time ever that poverty has increased during a period of economic expansion. Matt explains what is behind the dynamics:

[P]overty among seniors declining thanks to Great Society expansion of retirement support programs. The other is a jump in poverty for non-seniors during the 1978-82 period that persisted throughout the Reagan-Bush years. This was in part driven by an increase in the proportion of female-headed households without husbands, but the same pattern appears within that subset. We then had a giant reduction in poverty among this group in the 1990s which was a combination of strong economic performance, “welfare reform,” and also the fact that the Clinton administration really wanted to make welfare reform work so threw lots of stuff — EITC expansion, SCHIP, etc. — at making it work. Then we saw a slow, steady erosion of that progress.

I also think that it is important to note that the governmental definition of poverty is extraordinarily outdated. For one, it is income-based, not spending-based — it derives from what a family makes, not what it earns — skewing the data for reasons I explained yesterday. Second, the poverty threshold is, at its foundation, based on the cost of food. In the mid-1960s, government researchers found that the average family spent a third of its income on food. They therefore determined how much it would cost a family to live on basic basket of products, then tripled that amount — creating the poverty threshold. Every year, the government updates that number for inflation. The problem is that food has gotten relatively less expensive — families now spend just one in seven dollars on food. And many other things have gotten relatively more expensive — housing, child care, elder care, transportation. Third, the poverty threshold does not take into account the different costs of living around the country. Because the poverty threshold is so outdated, some researchers estimate the actual poverty rate should be around a third higher.

Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, gave this flash analysis of the numbers: “The net loss of jobs reported in today’s employment report captures a job market stuck in neutral. Roughly one in six workers are either unemployed or underemployed, and the labor force continues to decline. It is time for the government to do substantially more to create jobs so the backlog of unemployed workers can get back to work.”