An Ol' Broad's Ramblings
A Letter To The Census Bureau
This letter is a copy and paste I received via email. This is real letter, written by a real person. Obviously, I’m not including personal information, other than Herr Director’s, just the text:
Mr. Robert M. Groves
Director, U. S. Census Bureau.
Washington, D. C. 20233-0001
Dear Mr. Groves:
I have received your form notification that I will be receiving the 2010 Census form shortly. I appreciate your polite request that I fill it out and respond quickly. I will therefore respond as politely as I can with my criticisms.
First of all, your announced purpose for the Census and how it will be used violates the authority conferred by the United States Constitution. The authority to conduct a census every ten years was created by the People upon ratifying the Constitution in 1788. The specific purpose was to provide a count to support the apportionment among the states for authorizing representatives to Congress. The one other purpose allowed was to support the laying of capitation taxes, in Article 1, Section 9. There was no other purpose listed, and no other purpose is therefore authorized.
The specific wording is: “Article 1, § 1, Clause 3: Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States…, according to their respective Numbers… The actual 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.”
It says “In such manner,” not “for such purposes as they shall by law direct.”
Your list of purposes – “Results from the 2010 Census will be used to help each community gets its fair share of government funds for highways, schools, health facilities and many other programs you and your neighbors need.”
Lord it is hard to remain polite when I see you telling me what I need. What I need from the federal government is enumerated in Article 1, Section 8. In every other respect, leave me alone. Just go away, for God’s sake. Please. We did not form this government to take from some of us and hand out to others.
You and your government co-bureaucrats have overstretched your authority in every way imaginable, and it has turned into a tyrannic chaos. And expensive beyond human comprehension.
Let me tell you what you need. You need the location for which I am answering. You need the names and ages of the citizens residing in the identified location. That is all.
You do not need the names or numbers of aliens. You do not need the character of the structure, its plumbing, or whether I have an internet connection. You for sure have no business digging into my finances. The same goes for all the rest of your questions.
You also need to stop spending my tax dollars on ink and paper, multiplied millions of times, on alien language announcements and services. If you were interested in serving my pre-American heritage, you blew it anyway – none of your gibberish included French or Gaelic instructions.
And you bungled one other thing. The town I live in is NOT (name of city & state). You got the street and zip code correct, but (zip code) is (name of town). (name of town) is in the next county over. If you bungle that, what good is it going to do to give you my unrequired information, anyway?
So – just stick to what the Constitution authorized. Think of how proud we will all be that you kept your oath to uphold the Constitution. And how you cut your budget and saved us all that tax money.
With a few exceptions that includes the details, I think this is a pretty good letter. I wonder how those folks up in D.C. would react if MILIONS of such letters arrived on their doorstep?
We had our ‘first class’ To Resident of…. letter waiting for us in the mail when we got home today. Haven’t bothered to even open it. Just noticed that “first class’. If they really had to mail this crap out, wasting our money, couldn’t they have done a mass media rate, or some such?
I saw on the news last night that it was somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 mil to ship all those “you will receive a letter next week” letters…I thought it was ignorant when i got it, i’m actually aggrivated by it now… talk about government stupidity at its finest… and people wonder why our country is broke?!?
A perfect case of the oblivious guiding the clueless down the Primrose path.
Here’s my standard census reply:
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The enclosed survey has been answered in accordance with the constitutional proviso for enumerating the populous for the sole purpose of apportioning our representation.
The answer you are entitled to is “3″. There are three people living here.
Attempts by any agents of your organization to visit us in person will be treated as an act of trespass and attempted theft (the taking of our personal information without our permission) and will be met with due resistance, by armed force if necessary, to keep your representatives at bay.
Title 13, Chapter 1, Subchapter 1, Section 6, Statute ‘B’ states:
(b) The Secretary may acquire, by purchase or otherwise, from States, counties, cities, or other units of government, or their instrumentalities, OR FROM PRIVATE PERSONS and agencies, such copies of records, reports, and other material as may be required for the efficient and economical conduct of the censuses and surveys provided for in this title.(Emphasis mine.)
If your agency would like to excercise this option and purchase our private information, we are offering to answer any questions you would like to ask at $1000 per question. To accept, contact us by telephone or mail. ANY contact will be deemed an acceptance of this offer, and your office will be invoiced in advance of our response(s).
Upon acceptance of your payment, we will forward a notarized list of our answers to your office via registered mail.
-jjg
OMG! Priceless! LMAO