The Census Is Getting Personal. Be very afraid.

[CoolBreeze]

I don't like strangers asking me personal questions about my life. I will refuse to answer these:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsDhkPym01k


What purpose did the Constitution's framers have in mind ordering an enumeration, or count, of the American people every 10 years? The purpose of the headcount is to apportion the number of seats in the House of Representatives and, derived from that, along with two senators from each state, the number of electors to the Electoral College.

The Census Bureau tells us that, this year, it will use a shorter questionnaire, consisting of 10 questions. From what I see, only one of them serves the constitutional purpose of enumeration -- namely, "How many people were living or staying at this house, apartment or mobile home on April 1, 2010?"

The Census Bureau's shorter questionnaire claim is deceptive at best.

Americans need to stand up to Washington's intrusion into our private lives. What business of government is the number of times a citizen has been married or what he paid for electricity last month? For those who find such intrusion acceptable, I'd ask them whether they'd also find acceptable questions about their sex lives or their marriage fidelity.

What to do? Unless a census taker can show me a constitutional requirement, the only information I plan to give are the number and names of the people in my household. The census taker might say, "It's the law."

Thomas Jefferson said, "Whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force."

[Bob Campbell]

Damn, if you don't like the census, you must really be pissed off at the extension of the Patriot Act.

[AmpedNow]

I assume they use this information for national statistics.

Did anyone else get the long form census 10 years ago? That thing was a book... Took about half an hour to fill out.

And it asked much more personal questions than that.

I won't complain about 10 questions this time around.

[Bob Campbell]

Nothing to fear unless you have something to hide.

[cgarison]

That poor dude is a nut job.

Sad part is the Federal government would have access to the data even without the census if they would mine the databases available to them from Social Security and the semi-public data warehouses that store all of our personal and sensitive information like banks and credit bureaus.

My question is do we need a census in this day and age or could we pull all the data from existing sources??????

[fearpeddler]

would really be easy to cross reference ssn's with bank accounts

[Big Media]

The census is outdated, inaccurate, and completely irrelevant.

[Bob Campbell]

The census is outdated, inaccurate, and completely irrelevant.

Well, I know it's early in the year but it's going to be supremely difficult to top that post for it's proud pursuit of ignorance and stupidity.

[The Interpreter]

Let us try.

[Bob Campbell]

I'm sure we'll all give it our best effort.

[cgarison]

The census is outdated, inaccurate, and completely irrelevant.

Yes, but so is our tax code, social security and most other things related to the government.