Censless

I went to my mailbox the other day and was excited to see I had an envelope from the US Census Bureau. I sat down at my desk anxious to do my civic duty and fill out the form and get it sent in. That and the fact that if I left it on my desk to do later it would get lost in the sea of paper clutter and I'd get it sent in sometime late in 2013. So I opened the envelope ready to get down to business. Imagine my surprise when there wasn't a form in there. Just a letter telling me the form would be there in about a week. WTF?!?!? Do we really need a warning that the Census is coming? Unless you've been living in a cave the last 3 months I'm pretty sure you know it's coming. And even if not, the official form should sufice, the warning letter seems like a waste to me.

It just so happens at our union meeting last month we were talking about how much it costs the local to send out ballots for a vote. We have roughly 50 people in our union and the officials said it costs about $200 to send out ballots. That's for postage, paper, printing etc. I'm rounding off to make the math easy but it's in the ballpark. So using those numbers as a guide I figure it costs about $2 a person to send out those mailers for the union.

Now according too http://www.factfinder.census.gov/ as of 3/10/2010 the nations population is estimated at 308,837,740 people. Just as a guess lets say there are 4 people to every household in America, 308,837,740 divided by 4 is 77,209,435. Now lets say the government gets a really good deal on paper and printing etc and can do it for $1 instead of $2 although we all know this is the land of the $600 government hammer. So by my rough calculations the government spent roughly 78 MILLION dollars on this little mailer to let you know the actual census starts next week.

Now in this day and age of unemployment, budget cuts and red ink, is this really the best way to spend our taxpayer money? 78 million could go a long way toward education and keeping teachers working, or maybe fixing some of our aging infastructure, or even medical research. Anything but a mostly useless mailing to let you know another mailing is on the way.

I think the census is important, and I look forward to filling out my form, I just don't see the point of the "warning" that it's coming. I'm pretty sure most of us could have figured out the form was coming when we got it.