As I mentioned a few days ago, I am the unhappy recipient of the American Community Survey that is being sent to 3,000,000 households annually from 2003 thru 2009, then it is scheduled to go nationwide beginning in 2010. This "survey" is being distributed by the Census Bureau, who has determined it has the authority to demand responses to its very intrusive questions. Look out America, here comes "Big Brother." Let the Inquisition of the American People begin!
The cover page of the survey begins with:
People are our most important resource.
That alone should raise a red flag on the government's current view of "We, the People..." I can't speak for anybody else, however, I AM NOT A RESOURCE! And I am especially not the Federal Government's resource. Too me, this is similar to saying I am property, chattel, a slave to the system and have no rights, especially when it is coming from the Government.
The survey itself is even more disconcerting. It has the standard census time questions of name, age, birth date, address, etc. However, it then goes into demanding (not asking, these are not optional according to the laws cited): how many vehicles do you own, where do you work, when do you leave for work, how do you get there, details about income, housing and housing costs; how much is your house worth! The link above is a direct link to the 2005 survey. Download it and see for yourself.
This has lead me down the primrose path of discovery, as I try ascertain what I should do with this survey. During my explorations, I ran across The Hard-To-Interview in the American Community Survey, courtesy of the U.S. Census Bureau. This was published in 2000, while the survey was in test mode with only a few hundred thousand households receiving the survey.
The ACS collects the data using three modes of data collection, mail, telephone and personal visit. The data is collected for each monthly sample over a three month time span. The mail mode uses a pre-notice letter, the ACS questionnaire and a reminder post card. For those who do not mail their form back in about three weeks, a replacement questionnaire is mailed. For all mail returns, a computer edit checks the completeness of the questionnaire and if it is incomplete, a telephone follow up is conducted to try to complete the missing information. Currently we are getting about a 50% mail response.
Okay, they are getting about a 50% response rate on the mailing, frequently with multiple mailings, of a very large document. Cost to taxpayer? Lots. Effectiveness? Low. So far I have not found a more current version of this report. And it gets better.
It continues on to state that about 40% of the non-respondents have telephone numbers, and they begin to demand compliance via phone interviews. If phone interviewing fails to get the survey completed, they then send out field personnel to get a face-to-face interview. According to the report, they spent about three months attempting to get this survey completed.
Typically we have seen about a 50% mail response rate and another 10% telephone interviews. Large cities generally have a smaller mail response rate, down around 40% while some other areas have mail response rates over 60%. The remaining 40% is subsampled with about 13% being eligible for personal visit interviewing.
Nice. If you don't mail it back in their timeframe, they decide you are eligible for a phone interview. If you successfully dodge that, you are then honored to become eligible for a personal interview. Never mind that you may resent the intrusion on your privacy by the Government that is supposed to serve you, NOT the other way around (see earlier comment on being a government resource).
The report goes on to define how different sub-groups, divided by race, economic situation, etc., impacts the response rate of the survey. One point that should tell them quite a bit is:
The results for the mail returns is that minorities (including Hispanics), people in poverty, households with children, larger households, renters, persons with less than a high school education, persons living in apartment are all more likely to mail their ACS forms in late. These effects were generally smaller for telephone cases. These effects are completely gone or even reversed for late cases with personal visit interviews. The Hispanics, renters and persons in poverty are no longer more likely to be late, ingle person households and persons with greater than a high school education are the late cases for personal visit. I find this to be a striking feature and not what I would have expected.
Apparently, the better educated people who look at this survey as "Big Brother" and refuse to respond to the mail survey, continue to dodge, while those with less education tend to cave when they receive a "personal visit." Have they ever wondered why? Could it be that better educated folks are less intimidated by the "personal visit" or are better able to dodge it or otherwise unavailable? Or perhaps they are better able to intimidate less educated and/or impoverished folks, including minorities, into compliance.
Another document I found interesting is the Survey Nonresponse
On the basis of the statutory authority cited above and the discretion recognized by the courts, we conclude that Commerce and the Bureau have the legal authority to conduct the ACS under 13 U.S.C. §§ 141 and 193. This finding does not address the question of whether the data should be collected, but only whether there is sufficient legal authority to conduct this annual survey.
With regard to the question of whether the Bureau may require recipients to respond to the ACS, Bureau officials stated that the ACS is conducted under sections 141 and 193, cited above, and that because responses to Census Bureau censuses and surveys are required under 13 U.S.C. § 221, responses to the ACS are mandatory. Section 221 subjects recipients of a survey to monetary penalties for failure to answer questions on any survey conducted by the Bureau under certain authorities found in Chapter 5 of Title 13 of the United States Code. These authorities include censuses of manufacturers and other businesses under section 131, the decennial census of population under section 141, and interim current data for collection of population data between each census under section 181. Section 225 permits application of penal provisions in certain cases. For example, the provision for imprisonment does not apply to the interim current data surveys under section 181, although it does apply to the decennial census. 13 U.S.C. § 225(b). We note that the courts have held that there is a sufficient governmental interest to require the collection of census data and to assess penalties for the failure to comply. We conclude therefore that the Bureau may require responses to the ACS survey.
So, based on the above, and this same document makes references to Morales v. Evans, in which requiring responses to these types of questions has been upheld by the courts, this looks to me more and more like "Big Brother" at work.
Since the form requires detailed information on all occupants, what if you have roommates, like most college kids do? You are now required to obtain very private and personal information on them and report it to the Federal Government! When, in my youth, I was in college and lived in a rental with three other guys, had one of them come to me requesting I fill out such detailed information, I would have told him to take a hike. Or, if it were handed to me to fill out, I would then have access to the personal information of others in the shared household.
The bottom line is this: Are you government property and willing to submit to such invasions of your privacy, or is government subservient to the will of the American People? If the latter, I urge you to contact your Congressman and tell him how you fell about the American Community Survey and the invasion of your privacy.
The ACS is nothing more than a means to demean the American People, reducing them to being nothing more than government resources to be sucked dry, and leading the way to bigger, less efficient, and very intrusive government. Read the survey and see for yourself. Do you want government bureaucrats to have this kind of detailed information about you?
Meanwhile, I still have this "survey" to respond to. Yeesh!
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