The Census Bureau's American Community Survey
http://thekojonnamdishow.org/shows/2012-05-21/census-bureaus-american-community-survey
In 2010, the Census Bureau replaced its long form questionnaire, which happened once every ten years, and launched the American Community Survey. Now, 3 million Americans fill out the survey annually in order to help estimate and track trends among the entire population. Many government officials, business owners and nonprofits say this data is vital for them -- but some in Congress say it is a waste of money and an invasion of privacy.
Guests
D'Vera Cohn
Senior Writer, Pew Research Center's Social & Demographic Trends Project; co-author "Women, Men and the New Economics of Marriage"
Andrew Biggs
Resident Scholar, American Enterprise Institute
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Target uses statistical information from the American Community Survey to understand more about communities and better serve their guests:
Comments
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I'm thrilled you're drilling down on this issue, Kojo. In our letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal on this, my TechFreedom colleague Adam Marcus and I noted the value created by the ACS data, but asked why the ACS should be mandatory. I'd love to hear what your guests think!
As we note, it's one thing to compel Americans to provide their name and address. These questions are necessary to achieve the Constitutional purpose of the census: apportioning representatives. I don't necessarily object if the Census wants to collect more information, but why not let Americans opt out of this extra-Constitutional use of the Census? While most attention has focused on the Budget amendment passed by House Republicans defunding the ACS, a second amendment would have struck a better balance by simply defunding prosecution of those who decline to answer the ACS—thus essentially making it voluntary. Why isn't this the right compromise?
Privacy concerns about misuse of the detailed personal information collected by the Census are not imaginary. As we noted: "Our government has abused census data to awful effect, most notably in the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, as documented in a Scientific American article in 2007. More recently, the feds violated their express privacy policy by publishing all individual responses to the 1940 Census's similarly extensive questions—not just aggregated results." For more on that second issue, read Adam's recent piece in CNET: The census' broken privacy promise.