The 2010 Census effort is just beginning as the Census Bureau begins a $130 million campaign to mail Census forms to millions of U.S. households. The bureau was provided its largest budget ever, but has come under fire for already over spending with the effort just now underway.
Given the cost of the mail program, one can only wonder why the Census Bureau has opted to stick with the tradition of printing paper, the expense of mailing; both ways and the additional price of staffing up to count and tabulate the incoming census data, when creating an online census would be more effective and efficient.
According to the agency responsible for running the heavy ad campaign on television, in print, radio and online, all available funding is already earmarked. After repeated efforts to become part of the solution, TheBAYNET.com has been rebuked on at least six different occasions by this agency’s electronic marketing representative.
This is true, even though census participation in rural communities such as that of Southern Maryland and others has been woefully inadequate. During the last census effort of 2000, citizens in the Tri-County area are credited with only a 67 percent participation rate.
Perhaps, a more efficient and effective use of taxpayer money would have been for the Census Bureau to create a dynamic Internet reporting mechanism where people could interact, answer the ten basic questions, and file via online portal. To promote that effort would be a simple matter of working with news portal sites such as TBN to spread the word and to promote the census effort online – for what could have been a fraction of the overall $15 billion Census 2010 budget.
True, the effort to record illegal aliens, homeless and the indigent would still require ‘feet on the ground’ data gathering, but the lion’s share of census reporting could be accomplished in short order at a fraction of the cost allocated for the 2010 Census.
This online scenario may be even more effective, given participation in the Census is essentially confidential, reasonable, even for the new age of online anonymity which in which most people currently operate.
In any case, participation in the census is vitally important to communities such as Southern Maryland where the more accurate the counting data, the better allocation of Federal funding targeting the area will be. However, if that data collection effort was more effective, easier and less expensive, there very well could be more Federal funds to allocate and distribute.
