I did not forsee what we see today: blatant attempts to maintain power through force and subversion of the electoral system.
I think the problem is the entire culture itself. Democracy is about a kind of equality among people, and yet too many people don't really believe in that. If you like meritocracy, that's not equality. If you like capitalism, well it strongly tends towards economic inequality, which historically breaks down the democratic order. If you like American supremacy over China, male dominance over women, white supremacy over minorities, etc etc power fantasies.
Honestly given US history (slavery, individualism etc) I'm surprised democracy has lasted so long here. The Economist rates the US as a "flawed democracy", it has been undergoing erosion for a long time.
This change was still a significant issue more than four years later in the 2015 election. The long-form census was re-instated the day after the Liberal government took power and people were genuinely happy to fill out their 2016 census.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Canadian_census#Voluntary...
I think we can all guess how this will turn out down south.
The last time, during the last census, the census worker asked me why. I asked her if she knew about census data being used to round up U.S. citizens with unpopular ancestry and put them into concentration camps. She didn't, so I told her a little about the Japanese internment when my father was a teenager, and that I too have unpopular ancestry, and would prefer not to be on their list. She was agreeable.
Regardless, this is actually about the ACS anyways.
There's a good chance I'm overthinking it and being paranoid, but I'd never have had that resistance under any other Republican administration in the past.
I don't understand why it became a 70 question survey you are forced to answer. A core value of America is our right to obstruct any government attempt to improve our lives and I defend that stubborness.
Nobody tell this guy about how the interstate highways got built. Or about how we eradicated a dozen diseases. Or how civilization works, in general.
I think this is a reinvention of history, because much of American history, and the writings of the founders, do not seem to imply this. The core value to my understanding is "no taxation without representation", probably followed by freedom of speech (from government). I don't think this is true anymore though, given how many people are happy for the king to impose taxes on them at will.
I’m not defending what the Republicans are doing. I’m just clarifying it, so at least people can discuss what’s actually happening instead of having knee jerk reactions.
My biggest complaint about it is it’s used a ton by private sector so it’s basically government sponsored research for companies.
Corrected title:
"Republican bills would make the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey voluntary and bar enforcing mandatory responses to any census survey, citing privacy concerns and raising data-quality warnings."
"Language in a pending 2026 spending bill written by the Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives goes further. It would make both the ACS and the regular 10-year census voluntary, and would also prohibit the agency from reaching out more than once to anyone who doesn’t initially respond."
That text included a link to the bill: https://docs.house.gov/meetings/AP/AP00/20250910/118544/BILL...
From that bill I imagine they mean (page 146)
"SEC. 605. None of the funds in this Act may be used to enforce involuntary compliance, or to inquire more than twice for voluntary compliance with any survey conducted by the Bureau of the Census."
"What poor/vulnerable people? There's none in the US, look at the census data! Clearly we don't need to do anything for them!"
FTA:
"The ACS, an offshoot of the decennial census, contains roughly 70 questions on housing, employment, education, health, military service, and other demographic details. Each question has been ordered by Congress or requested by an agency to carry out its mission. “But some of them are pretty invasive,” says a spokesperson for Steube, citing questions about when someone begins their daily commute to work and whether they have difficulty getting dressed."
They're sensitive, not invasive. And the whole point is to find out if there are people with sensitive needs, so we can help them.
The Republican party just doesn't like the idea of helping people. Anything that could improve people's lives gives them the willies.
hodgehog11•2h ago
rayiner•1h ago
hodgehog11•1h ago
JumpCrisscross•1h ago
The variance in voting preferences dominates this effect. We simply have insufficient data to make statements like this confidently, a fact being laid bare by the potential fuckup that has been the Texas redirecting.
rayiner•3m ago
saghm•1h ago
rayiner•6m ago
mindslight•12m ago
When they're actually in office it's obvious that they have absolutely zero intention of living up to these ideals, but in fact their main agenda is to abuse them in hypocritical displays of power. So it's only a diminishing number of followers that continue twisting themselves in knots with cognitive dissonance.
This is why they often start flashy wars - to distract from outright harmful domestic agendas and try to bolster support based on some common external enemy. Tramp himself is of course also trying to distract from the revelations of long term spicy kompromat hanging over his head. The things some people will do to get a loan, smh.
austin-cheney•1h ago
The reason for the census comes directly from the US constitution and its only stated purpose there is to redistribute congressional districts and Electoral College electors.
My own personal opinion favors giving government as much access to data as possible because contrary to what many people claim government is overwhelmingly more productive compared to the private sector.
terminalshort•1h ago
schmidtleonard•1h ago
On cold nights, you dream of a glorious future where an unregulated energy utility could try to trick you into surge pricing?
When you wrote your post, you did so with teeth clenched in disgust at having to use a government invention?
When you take the trash out, you wish it were a bit more exciting, that you had to dodge gunfire from skirmishing warlords?
And so on, and so on, but the point is that a statement you probably intended as a slight hyperbole actually required a staggering amount of "out of sight, out of mind."
deburo•58m ago
collingreen•38m ago
Are you trying to say that you think the current US budget is bad and therefore all government spending for all time is inherently bad and worse than every other option? If so that's a really weak take.
hodgehog11•32m ago
The government is an enormous ship and you want enough checks and balances to ensure it cannot suddenly turn on a dime without a huge emergency.
As for the debt, that mostly comes down to:
1) Military spending to enforce US domination across the globe.
2) Social security for the Boomers (many countries are being hit by this).
3) Unsustainably low tax rates given the requirements of government. In particular, the presence of numerous tax loopholes for the ultra-wealthy.
4) The insanity of the healthcare industry in the US.
hodgehog11•1h ago
Whoa, that's a very strong statement that requires some refinement I think.
In any case, I understand the claimed reasons, but I remain skeptical. Sometimes making something "voluntary" is not in the interests of freedom or small government. I'm sure the founding fathers were aware of that.
> to redistribute congressional districts and Electoral College electors
That's extremely important and has been used to "remarkable" effect in recent years.
schmidtleonard•1h ago
Yes, but much of that refinement would be the gritty details of pushing back on awful self-serving definitions that were carefully crafted to mislead. Flouting them altogether is a strong opener.
Contrast to the boring analytical speech: "The notion of value espoused by neoliberal economics is wealth-weighted while the colloquial definition of the word does not have a wealth-weight attached, sometimes even the opposite (see: feeding orphans). This loophole is large enough to march 1000 elephants through and wage a class war. "Value Creation" is not about doing what people want, it's about doing what wealth-weighted people want, and as inequality grows that increasingly means doing what rich people want, which is primarily to pump assets so that they can get paid for being rich. This twist of terminology is how you can brainwash someone into thinking that enshittification, in all its forms, is somehow for the greater good, when it's actually just for the good of rich people who want to get paid for being rich."
The boring analytical speech is theoretically the stronger argument, but if theoretically stronger arguments won elections we wouldn't be here. So the best move is just to reverse-uno the "government bad, drown it in a bathtub, private sector good" propaganda.
hodgehog11•42m ago
It seems that people will only willingly act in the common good for small communities; at the level of government, you either enforce the common good, or you take advantage of greed and try to loosely direct it into the interests of the common good. Right now there is an argument to be made that we are not successfully achieving the latter strategy as "Value Creation" is now a bastardization of its original intent. But the former option is too diabolical to consider.
crims0n•36m ago
People always make this about public vs private sector but in my experience, it has more to do with the size of the organization. Large private sector organizations are just as susceptible to the slow-as-molasses bureaucratic processes as big government. Similarly, I have seen local governments be as fast-moving and agile as a startup. The simple reality is, the more people and processes are involved, the longer things take.