This makes no Census

Talking about a program that should be scaled back... The U.S. Census is a Constitutionally mandated program. Done every ten years, it is to take a head count "enumeration" of every person in the United States. This requirement allows the representation in Washington D.C. to be adjusted accordingly.

There are a couple of problems to be solved. First, the Census has been expanded by Congress to include categories well outside the scope of simply counting heads. Now they demand to know how many toilets we have, how far we drive to work, how large is our house, how many televisions do we own, are we black, white, hispanic, asian, etc. (In my opinion Congress and government in general are the biggest reason the bigotry and prejudice still exist to the extent that it does.) Second, Congress arbitrarily decided to change the requirements for seating representatives by only allowing a small number of members. The Constitution clearly states that there shall be at least one representative in the House for every 30,000 citizens. By my calculations that means that there should be 10,267 representatives currently seated.

The House at some point decided that such a large number of representatives was impractical. With so many members there would be a glut of bills on the floor at all times and that nothing would get done. PERFECT! No Constitutional amendment was ever presented to the States for ratification. The average number of constituants that a house member represents is nearly 706,000. Not the kind of representation I'm comfortable with. This opens the doors for lobbyists and large corporations leaving you and I hanging in the wind. With a large number of representatives in Washington there would be far less influence peddling and more individual contact with you and I.

The current budget of the Bureau of Census is about 2.3 billion dollars. By scaling back the Census to a simple one question postcard I suspect that more than half of the billions of dollars could be saved. The number of people required to keep track of the population would be reduced dramatically. Labor is, of course, the most expensive part of any government project. A much simpler accounting would be less costly and not as likely to provide as many errors.

You and I would not be harassed by census takers because we opted to only answer one question on the census. The U.S. Postal Service would have a much simpler job delivering the census to and from the citizens of the U.S. We would not become the political rubber balls that now are bounced around by Congress and the President.

In the short run you and I would have fewer bureaucrats looking through our lives and in the long run there would be billions more available in the free market.