Holy Cow, that's a lot of Census workers! 

According to this article:

"The Census Bureau projected in April that it anticipates hiring a total of around 635,000 positions in all for the Door-to-Door visits. "

and

"
"America's had a very successful first half of the 2010 Census, where more than 72 percent of the nation's households mailed back their census forms," U.S. Census Bureau Director Robert Groves said.

The 72 percent response rate matches that of the 2000 census."

So, remember my post about all the advertising and letters they sent to try to get a good response rate to the census?  Well, turns out it didn't change the response rate. 


From what I have seen, the 2000 census cost 4.5 billion dollars. But the 2010 census is going to cost us 14.5 billion dollars. That is right, 10 BILLION dollars more than 10 years ago and we didn't have any better outcome. Only the government gets to throw around money like this, since it isn't theirs.

And to top all that off, the jobs numbers are being artificially inflating by hiring these temporary census workers.  Once the job is over, they will be loosing their jobs.

I know, I know, what more can you expect from our government.  Some how I don't think the founders could have imagined that counting our people could be so complicated and expensive.
 
So, I just saw a census commercial letting us know that we need to fill out our census and send it back.  If you add the cost of that, to the cost of the mailing of the letter that came a week before the census letting us know that we would be receiving the census and then the postcard that came after the census reminding us to send in our census, I think the cost of this census will be quite larger than those in the past (we will just add that onto the cost of all the other spending the government has done in the last year).  I'm sure they figure this will get more people to send in their census, but I am not so sure.  I guess time will tell.

I already sent ours in.  I only answered the first 2 question, one being how many people lived in our household and the other, whether there were any other people staying here that were not accounted for in question 1.  These are the questions that are required to determine how many seats our state will have in the US House of Representatives.  The government also says that it will be used to determine how much funding your community receives, but according to the US Constitution this is not what the census is for.

Frankly, I don't think it should matter to the government the names of each member of my household, our race, whether we rent or own, our phone number, our sex, and our birth dates.   

I do not believe the federal government should be taking money from the people and then giving it back to the people in response to the census.  This is the job of the state and local governments.  They are telling the people to send in their forms so they can make sure everyone gets their money for their communities.  I think this is called pork spending and if most American's thought about it, they would not agree to it.

So, what will happen to me since I did not fill out and complete the whole census form?  I don't know for sure.  The worst that could happen would be having a census worker come by and a fine of $100.  If I were to lie on my form, I could get a $500 fine, but I did not lie on my form.  But from what I have read, they have not gone this far in the past.  We will see how they approach things this time around.  They seem to be taking a pretty aggressive approach so far in trying to get people to send back their census forms, so we will see if they will start trying to impose the fines for people who do not completely comply.

I considered just filling out the form completely and sending it back and just doing what I am told.  But, as the title of this site says, I am a free-thinker and decided to stand up for what I believe.