Dear Colleagues: After a year of your calls and letters, in January, Congress secured funding for the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) for 2007. Unfortunately, the President's budget for 2008 eliminates funding for the SIPP yet again, and allocates a meager $15.9 million to further develop the Dynamics of Economic Well Being (DEWS), a new survey the Bureau is developing to replace the SIPP. While we applaud the Bureau's effort to develop a more accurate and accessible survey, we believe it would be a great mistake to eliminate the SIPP, our government's only reliable source of longitudinal data on household well-being, before the DEWS has been tested and proven its superiority.
In response, we have drafted a letter to the House and Senate appropriations subcommittee that works on Census Bureau funding. They saved the SIPP once -- and with your help -- they will do it again. If you are a social science researcher, we ask you to sign the letter at <http://www.democracyinaction.org/dia/organizationsORG/cepr/petition.jsp?petition_KEY=574&t=ceprdata.dwt>http://www.democracyinaction.org/dia/organizationsORG/cepr/petition.jsp?petition_KEY=574&t=ceprdata.dwt, and please share this message with your colleagues. We will be closing the letter on Friday, May 11, 2007. Sincerely, Dean Baker, Heather Boushey and John Schmitt
