Quote:
Originally Posted by mithrilG60
Besides your tax dollars are paying for this exercise and you can bet that it's cheaper to pay the census takers to mail out the forms and do the resulting data entry than is it to pay bureaucrats to pull this information from multiple sources across several departments and/or levels of government.
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True.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mithrilG60
If collated by geographical district they can make predictions about future school use based on population trends. For example if district A has 50% of households where the age is under 40 and district B has 65% of households over 50 you know that district A is likely to need more school services simply because it has a higher percentage of it's population in their child bearing and rearing years.
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While mostly true, neighborhoods and zip codes can change drastically in the 10 years between censuseseses. sp?
Example: The Northern Virginia landscape has changed so dramatically over the past decade, the census data taken in 2000 has been worthless for school planning since 2002.
We still need the census, but the data is truly only useful in a suburban environment like the DC Metro area for 2 years. Demographics, income levels, age groups can change in as little as a year based on an article in the Post.