2012 American Community Survey

So… am I the only one who hasn’t filled out the 28 page  "2012 American Community Survey" from the US Census Bureau that came in the mail in January?

On the front of the envelope it says “YOUR RESPONSE IS REQUIRED BY LAW!!” This immediately got my attention so I did some research and discovered that it only goes out randomly to 2% of the population. I opened it up and looked at the questions and said screw this I’m not doing it. To many of the questions they ask are of a personal nature and are none of their business. So I did what any freedom loving American would do and deposited it into the garbage can were it belonged.

So as a result I’ve been getting almost daily phone calls from them the last few weeks and always when I’m in bed trying to sleep and unable to answer it. 2 days ago I couldn’t sleep so I got up early and not long after the phone rang.  It was the CB. I told the women I wasn’t filling it out and to please stop calling and harassing me. I also told her she was welcome to come to my house and drag me off to jail or fine me but I wasn’t filling it out. Then I hung up.

So guess what? Today the same routine, I just got another call and I said the same thing to a different guy. He said they had to have 2 refusals to stop the calls. Hopefully now they’ll leave me alone. I’m wondering what kind of correspondence I’ll get from them in the mail since I refused to fill it out? I can hardly wait.

As you may or may not know when Obama administration first came up with this survey in 2008 they said you could be fined $5000 for not filling it out. Since then no one has been actually fined because the CB doesn’t have any legal authority to enforce the laws that require the ACS to be answered.

Here’s what Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas said in 2010 about the ACS. He sums up my feelings perfectly on this issue.

“The American Community Survey amounts to an Obama administration attempt to create a government dossier on American citizens."

"The federal government has a constitutional duty to count the number of people in the United States every 10 years," Poe said. "But the federal government has no business keeping a comprehensive personal profile on every American citizen.”

"The government can take this detailed information about each person who answers the American Community Survey and use that information for its own purposes," he said. "This is Big Brother at its worst. To me, it's an invasion of privacy by the federal government all in the name of taking care of us."

Here’s yet another example of our tax dollars being wasted on a government program that in my mind is unnecessary, unconstitutional and clearly is a document that could be used for political purposes against us by Obama and the Democrats in Congress. If any of you have received this wonderful little survey in the mail do what did, don’t fill it out and throw it in the trash where it belongs.