Abolishing the survey outright strikes most of the commentators on the thread (myself included) as a cynical ploy to get rid of politically inconvenient information. That said, I see a good case for abolishing the mandatory response requirement, for both philosophical and practical reasons:
Philosophical: Free societies require their governments to meet high standards of justification before they pry into citizens’ private affairs. These standards of justification are narrow and tightly delimited (e.g. involuntary searches of one’s persons and effects generally require a warrant); mass collection of demographic data just doesn’t cut it.
Practical: Realistically, what kind of data is the government going to get from someone who resents being asked all these questions and/or just doesn’t want to be bothered? Not data that bears much resemblance to reality, I daresay. The survey would be better off screening these people out by letting them circular-file the questionnaire.
I saw this “Community Survey” blasted on a thread on another messageboard as an instance of police-state information-mining tactics. The assumption is that if you send in a completed form, the FBI, etc., will have access to it (“the government” being all one thing); which is presumed to be the whole point of it.
You can imagine the reactions I got, when I posted that “I have never heard” of the FBI getting anybody’s personal information from census forms.
Not a new worry, I suppose. With every Census there seems to be speculation/assumption that the forms will be used to find undocumented immigrants. SNL did a skit on that in 1980 – one of the questions on their fictitious sample form was, “If agents of the INS were to come to your home, where would you hide?”
The thing is, for people like me (in libraries, for example) to do our jobs we really need to know things like how many Spanish speakers there are in our community. This is important stuff! (And I have no idea why language isn’t on the Census, since it used to be.)
Have you ever been a victum of the American Community Survey? I have and it really put a sour taste in my mouth and these mother fuckers can just go to hell.
A few polite notices up front before you get the survey. Then you get the long form census that was ended because too many people find the questions invasive.
Are you mentally ill? How many pregnant women were in your house last year? What time of day do you leave for work? How far is that drive? We would like the name and contact information of your employer. How much money do you make? How many toilets do you have? What is your average electricity bill? You must provide the answers for each individual who lives in this household.
And it goes on and on. It is like an identity theft joke, but it is real.
What follows if you fail to respond is 30 days of mail harassment, 30 days of phone harassment from obvious call center employees who do not know what they are talking about. Threats of $100 to $5000 fines if you don’t comply. Followed by 30 days when a census employee may sit outside your house and try to bully you into providing the answers to the 78 questions.
Except that the actual truth if you confront them is that no one, ever, in the history of the Census has been fined for refusing to answer. They will say "well we hope we won’t have to resort to that’ but the reality is they do not want to fine anyone because that will give them standing in court to challenge the Survey.
I am not a crank or an anti government type at all, but these are some serious cocksuckers and the Republicans get my support on this issue.
The information mined is then provided free by the US Dept of Commerce to a wide variety of organizations from the Pew Research Center to Walmart. They will tell you that the information is needed so the government can decide where to build schools and roads. But it is really about targeting funds to find customers for government programs and decide where to build the next Wal Mart.
I would provide links to a copy of the form but I have to go to work. You can look up the form yourself, or maybe someone will link it, and then ask yourself if you would volunteer this information. I won’t.
Our dysfunctional family never even filled out a census form, we got them in the mail and just laughed and threw them away(I’m paranoid and my mom is from Germany) .
An informational copy of the American Community Survey is available on http://www.census.gov/acs/www/methodology/questionnaire_archive/ in English and Spanish.
I don’t see the mentally ill question that Dallas Jones mentioned, although there are questions that appear to attempting to count the number of handicapped or very elderly people in the home. There’s also an interesting series of questions to quantify if the children in the home are cared for by parents or grandparents.
The income questions seem to be similar to the government required tax forms.
The form is much longer than I expected, and I think if there were many people in the home, it would take some time to fill out.
I wonder when some enterprising crook will send out a batch of phony government-survey forms (assuming it hasn’t been done already).
That’s why I’m convinced that removing the mandatory-response requirement (even if not really enforced beyond the level of persistent pestering) would improve accuracy. As it is, the path of least resistance for someone who doesn’t want to volunteer this information is to just make shit up so that the survey takers think they’ve got what they want and leave you alone. It would also be a lot cheaper to compensate for lower response rates by just sending out a correspondingly greater number of forms (instead of hiring people for the aforementioned persistent pestering).
Documentation of wealth concentration, for example.
