Yesterday, I got a letter in the mail from the 2010 U.S. Census. It was a letter to inform me that in a few days, I would be receiving a census in the mail and it was very important that I fill it out.
If this letter was sent out to every one of the estimated 113,567,967 households in America, times a 44 cent stamp, then our government just spent $49,969,905.48 (almost 50 million dollars) to tell us to watch our mail. Go Government. . . . How many people's insurance could have been covered this year with that money???
Just sayin'.
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10 comments:
We got one too. My mom was upset of such a waste of money. It's ridiculous!
I thought the same thing (but didn't do the actual math for it!). What a waste!
Ah, we all had the very same reaction! Stupid, wasteful government!! But then I thought, perhaps this letter acts as an upfront alert so that people won't throw away the Census questionnaire when it arrives, won't treat it as junk mail. Who knows what their reasoning is. It might have more merit than we think . . . but probably not. :0)
Aunt DD
I want to vomit.
Not to mention the waste of trees!
I got one of those, too. I actually thought that the government is probably allowed to mail things for free, since the postal service is a government run program. After all, when we had food stamps, we didn't have to pay the tax on the food we bought with that money. It seems like the same kind of principle.
Samantha, you do bring up a good point. Certainly with that many mailings, the 2010 Census would get a 'bulk rate.' . . .so I should amend that number. Anyone know what the bulk ratte of 113.4 billion is??
Sadly, government programs' budgets run independently of each other, so I doubt that the mailings would be 'free' in terms of postage. . . not to mention the cost of copies, paper, and labor to assemble and stuff the envelopes. Thus I stand my my original number of at least 50 million dollars for these mailings (and probably more)-- might I add to us it seems like a lot, but in government terms this is 'chump change'-- and thus begins our problem of a huge, huge deficit.
I thought the same thing when we got our alert letter. Not smart...
What I would like to know is why we can't fill it out online and save ALL of the paper and postage. Oh well, maybe in 2020 our government will be a little more technologically advanced!
That's funny, I thought the same thing.
Maybe the government gets a discount on postage??
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