Is anyone else bothered by the Census Bureau’s new ads? The primary message seems to be that you should fill out the Census forms so that you can get your “fair share of funding.” I’m pretty sure that’s not what the founding fathers had in mind when they added this language to the Constitution:
[An] Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct.
The only Constitutional purpose for the Census is to determine the number of Representatives each State should receive in the House of Representatives, and by extension, Electors for the Electoral College.
Don’t get me wrong… I think that there’s a lot of interesting material in the Census. For example, 81.2% of married-couple families (that is, families with both a husband and a wife, with or without kids) owned their home, according to the 2000 Census. That’s kind of a neat little factoid, and there’s tons of this kind of stuff in the Census. You can search all the Census data, even to your own neighborhood. In the Census Block where I live, which is maybe a quarter of a square mile, there were 482 people in 2000, mostly living in rental housing (84.4%). About a third of these were married-couple families (73 households out of 208 total). Only three people (one man and two women) were over the age of 65 and living alone; all were renters.
But the purpose of it all is not (or at least, shouldn’t be) to see how much money your community can squeeze out of the Feds. But that’s another symptom of living under Democrats, who seem to think that the purpose of the Federal Government is to redistribute wealth.
