The Importance of the US Census
Cited: Time/Chicago Tribune
This year the 23rd census was mailed out. It started in a remote corner of Alaska and has continued throughout the rest of the country, that includes Puerto Rico and the Island Areas of American Samoa, Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam and the Virgin Islands with the goal of counting every resident once, and only once, and in the right place.
Although the 2010 Census questionnaire is simple and easy to fill out, the census is a massive, complex operation involving millions of forms and hundreds of thousands of census workers. To mark this milestone in the nation’s history, the Census Bureau presents some of the amazing numbers involved in counting the nation’s estimated 309 million residents.
This year’s U.S. Census is one of the shortest in history and has begun arriving in mailboxes already. Its 10 questions shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes to complete. Some of the questions are less invasive than ones you’d answer while shopping online. Yet, the Census Bureau is expecting only two thirds of U.S. households to return the forms. Why do people make such a fuss over completing something that is required by the Constitution to take place every 10 years? And why has the Census Bureau spent $133 million on a media campaign to increase public awareness of the once-a-decade population count?
Because the answers to these 10 questions help the government produce data used to determine the number of seats each state has in the U.S. House of Representatives. Not to mention, $400 billion of federal funding is on the line. The Census data helps communities receive this federal funding for hospitals, job training centers, schools, senior centers, bridges, tunnels and emergency services, according to 2010.census.gov.
Census comes from the Latin censere, which does not mean count so much as estimate, and 2,500 years ago in Rome, people were already squirrelly about being estimated. The penalty for refusing to reveal how many people lived in your household, how many slaves, how much livestock, was forfeiting it all and becoming a slave yourself. The Bible tells the story of God getting so mad at King David for ordering a Census that He sent a plague that killed 70,000 people in three days.
David’s plague may have deterred census takers for many years, but when the Founding Fathers invented American democracy, they realized that if you are going to have government by the people, you need to know who and where they are. The founders stuck a Census requirement in the Constitution so that every 10 years, the young, stretchy country would recalculate which states got how many lawmakers. They worried that a state might try to inflate its population to increase its representation, so they cleverly arranged that the first Census would also be used to spread around the costs of the Revolution. In 1790, 650 federal marshals on horseback began going house to house. It cost $45,000 and took a year and a half to count 3.9 million people.
Well, 220 years later, lawmakers are so unpopular, it’s a wonder people fight over the means of getting more of them — except that nowadays about $400 billion per year in federal aid follows the Census numbers, for everything from jobs to bridges to schools, so this really matters.
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Of course, there would be more money to spread around if it didn’t cost so much to count us in the first place: about $15 billion, according to some estimates. That includes $338 million for ads in 28 languages, a Census-sponsored NASCAR entry, hiring Marie Osmond to do outreach on QVC, $2.5 million for a Super Bowl ad and spots on Spanish radio and soap operas and Dora the Explorer. The ads are meant to boost the response rate, since any household that doesn’t mail back its form gets visited by a Census worker, another pricey line item. In all, it will work out to about $49 per person, which makes you wonder whether the government should have just sent an e-mail instead of a packet that looks like junk mail. But the Census officials worried about privacy, so the increasingly irrelevant post office, whose volume dropped 13% last year, gets a spring boost.
Why would anyone not want to be counted anyway in? Illegal immigrants fear exposure, despite laws forbidding any court or agency from seeing the information; indiscreet Census workers can be fined up to $250,000. Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann warned that during World War II, Census data was shared with the FBI “at the request of President Roosevelt, and that’s how the Japanese were rounded up … I’m not saying that that’s what the Administration is planning to do,” she said, but nonetheless she vowed that she’ll state how many people are in her household and nothing more. Since participation is mandatory, this puts her in danger of committing a misdemeanor and being subject to a $5,000 fine.
About 72% of U.S. households returned their forms in 2000, according to a March 15 Associated Press story. The states expected to be hardest hit by the 2010 Census are Florida, Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, Texas and North Carolina because of the low participation in the 2000 Census, and because “these states have larger-than-average shares of Hispanics and young adults, which are hard-to-count demographics,” according to the Census Bureau.
For the first time, the Bureau is mailing out bilingual English-Spanish census forms to 13 million households. U.S. residents will receive a postage-paid envelope along with their Census form to return the form to the bureau. If residents fail to complete and return the form, they may receive a follow-up visit from a census taker, which costs the government an estimated $1.5 billion, according to the AP story.
“If the American public comes through in the way everyone is capable of, we’ll have a great census,” Census Bureau Director Robert Groves said.
“All Census Bureau employees take the oath on nondisclosure and are sworn for life to protect the confidentiality of the data,” according to the Census Bureau website. Hopefully, this will alleviate the fears of some residents who fear the Census for privacy reasons, the government site explains that it is against the law to disclose or publish names, addresses including GPS coordinates, Social Security numbers and telephone numbers.
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My Take: Well, I learned something I wish I didn’t know about our government. Our government actually used the Census to round up the Japanese-Americans at the beginning of World War II. That is just about as bad as what the US government did to the American Indians. Anyway, I can understand why some people don’t want to throw one out because of their privacy.
One good point, some people will get a job out of this even if it is only temporary. At least the government has good payroll solutions. I just don’t know how they can keep accurate time and attendance records for Census workers unless they are salaried and have to fill a quota to get paid. With it being tax time, is a good thing that the IRS can’t check the census records.
It being April, I am sure that there are going to be many NY income tax accountants that are very busy. Tax forms can be so confusing that many people will hire a New York tax preparer to get through all the confusion. Then again, you’ll find an average person somewhere who is going through light bulbs like crazy because they are staying up all night trying to figure out their taxes. Of course if they used halogen light bulbs there probably wouldn’t have some problem seeing what they were writing or reading. Those things are so bright they make my eyes hurt.
But back to the subject of the article, I hope that everybody fills out their Census this year. I have done mine and it was extremely easy. It took me less than five minutes to fill out. Only problem I see is from a genealogy standpoint. This year’s census asks how many people are living in the house, if any additional were staying there (not named), whether the home was mortgaged, owned, rented or occupied without rent, telephone number and the name, sex, age, date of birth, race of the people living there up to 4 people. It does not provide additional information about occupation, marital status or parents.
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