Enumeration
Means count. Not 28 pages of personal info.
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August 1st, 2008 at 10:32 am
In the linked article, it is pointed out that nobody has been prosecuted for failure to fill out the form, and that there are penalties in place for census workers who might breach the confidentiality of the census responders. It does not say that census workers have ever breached citizen confidentiality (say, for credit fraud or other criminal endeavors) nor was the question asked, “Have any census workers been prosecuted and punished under the noted penalties?” In other words, the article is incomplete and hence rather uninformative, except that there is an intrusive census questionnaire distributed annually.
I say toss it, several times if necessary, and ignore any further attempts to gather the information, or (as the lady in the story did) just put your name and address, and send it back blank. They can fill it out to meet their own agenda!
August 1st, 2008 at 10:45 am
A rather prominent radio host here in Nashville got one of those last year, he said he threw it away.
About a month later, he got a letter saying that he was required to fill out the packet. He threw that away, too.
He’s still on the air, so I think it’s pretty safe to ignore.
August 1st, 2008 at 2:09 pm
Last time I got a census form I filled in the Name, Address, Number of Adults living at residence, Number of Children living at residence blocks and sent it in. Any other information requested was none of their damn business.
The only reason (currently) for a census is apportionment among the several States for Representatives in the House.
August 3rd, 2008 at 8:39 am
Magus has exactly my opinion. The US Census was soley intended for the purpose of apportionment, not for divvying up the largesse from a bloated federal government (the excuse most often proffered).
The actual text of the statute reads:
—————– From: http://uscode.house.gov/download/pls/13C7.txt
-HEAD-
Sec. 221. Refusal or neglect to answer questions; false answers
-STATUTE-
(a) Whoever, being over eighteen years of age, refuses or
willfully neglects, when requested by the Secretary, or by any
other authorized officer or employee of the Department of Commerce
or bureau or agency thereof acting under the instructions of the
Secretary or authorized officer, to answer, to the best of his
knowledge, any of the questions on any schedule submitted to him in
connection with any census or survey provided for by subchapters I,
II, IV, and V of chapter 5 of this title, applying to himself or to
the family to which he belongs or is related, or to the farm or
farms of which he or his family is the occupant, shall be fined not
more than $100.
(b) Whoever, when answering questions described in subsection (a)
of this section, and under the conditions or circumstances
described in such subsection, willfully gives any answer that is
false, shall be fined not more than $500.
(c) Notwithstanding any other provision of this title, no person
shall be compelled to disclose information relative to his
religious beliefs or to membership in a religious body.
-SOURCE-
(Aug. 31, 1954, ch. 1158, 68 Stat. 1023; Pub. L. 85-207, Sec. 15,
Aug. 28, 1957, 71 Stat. 484; Pub. L. 94-521, Sec. 13, Oct. 17,
1976, 90 Stat. 2465.)
—————–
That’s been amended under Title 18 to increase the fines to $1000 and $5000, respectively. Gotta keep up with the inflated dollar, you know.
August 3rd, 2008 at 10:10 pm
I worked as a census enumerator in 1990.
The next official enumeration isn’t until Jan 1, 2010, so this isn’t part of that. Such questionaires look like an attempt to justify census official’s salaries for the other nine years of the decade. I’d throw it out. But I can afford the $1,000 fine…
When it comes to the full enumeration, don’t throw the forms out, but I expect that you can only fill in the parts actually required for an enumeration (the address, with names and birthdates for everyone living there on Jan 1, 2010). The census workers will have to keep coming back until they do get that much, but once they get that much they’re done. If they can’t get the minimum… There was this old farmhouse, with no furniture, no glass in the windows and a hole in the roof (in Michigan where some nights in January would have hit 20 below inside that structure), and because there were no neighbors within miles to say that it was uninhabited, they kept sending out workers to look at it until July before they would list it as uninhabited.