Senseless Census.

        So I started my "trainging" as a Census Enumerator on Saturday.  We met at a fast-food restaurant that has Golden Arches at 8:30 am.  I collected my paper work, messenger bag, and marked the attendance sheet.  I sat down with my paper work and started filling things out before the Crew Leader even called the meeting to order.  By the time he had introduced the schedule I had already filled out half of the paper work.  By the time he had started the actual "training" or "orientation" I had filled out all of the paper work, put it in the order it was supposed to be in and had started reading a book to bide the time.  Six hours later the class was over and we were allowed to leave so long as we had finished having our fingerprints taken.  Just a little math for those who are interested.  I was paid $11.75 an hour for my time which was calculated from the minute I left my house.  So I left my house at about 8:00am and arrived at about 8:30am.  I was also then paid for the time it took me to return home another 30 minutes.  In just travel time I "earned" $11.75.  Oh, but that's not all.  I was also paid $.50 per mile to travel to the restaurant.  It was 24 miles round trip.  So I "earned" another $12 just to get to and from the meeting.  So far so good.  I then sat through the reading of 5 hours of mindless droning about how important it was to make sure you entered everything just so.  In all I "worked" for 6.5 hours and "earned" a total of $88.38 while reading a book, signing my name to a dozen pages, and inking my fingers.  Now lets just go ahead and multiply that by the number of people at this "training" which I will estimate at 25 making the total for just the trainees at $2209.50 that doesn't include the Crew Leader pay for 2 crew leaders and 2 Crew leader assistants.   Keep in mind that I was one of the first to leave after getting my fingerprinting done so this number is actually much higher.   This total of greater than $2000 was for a task that I completed without instruction in less than a half hour.  If this task were to take even an hour for someone to complete on top of an hour for transportation we can assume that 2 hours are needed for the task.  That would make the total savings from this task roughly $1325 for just the first day of training.  Drag that out to the 5 days of 5hour training (remember that I'll also get paid for travel time and miles) and the average savings could be over $5000 in just the training (assuming it takes a third of the time that they schedule). The Census this year will cost roughly 3 times the amount spent on the 2000 Census.  The amount per person counted will have jumped from $15.99 to nearly $46.93, or more than any jump from one census to the next since 1790.  In case you're wondering the price per person has gone down one time census to census in 1890 it cost 18.33 cents per person in 1900 it cost 15.54 cents.  This as a result of an estimated increase of population of about 27 million.  In researching for this blog I found an article that says the costs of this Census would have been $3billion less if the Census Bureau would have approved hand held enumeration devices.  Bringing the estimated cost of the Census to over $14 billion.  I contend that the Census could have cut even more from the costs by not only doing the computerized option but by also eliminating the oft derided "pre-census" mailing.  It's no wonder that the National debt will triple under this administration if this is how they run the Census.  Please for the sake of the country return your Census paperwork so that I don't have to waste your money by knocking on your door to fill out a form that will be processed manually and rechecked manually by at least 4 other people before actually being counted.