Runaway Census Cost Is Frightening Preview of True Obamacare Price Tag
By Gregg Opelka on temporary census workers
Friday's May jobs figure is vastly skewed because of the hundreds of thousands of temporary census employees—approximately 411,000—hired to perform the decennial enumeration of the U.S. population and gather concomitant vital information. In the coming days, economists will be assessing the distorting effect the addition of these temporary public sector workers has on the restoration or creation of employment and the overall strength or weakness of the economic recovery.
A few non-economists like myself, however, will be asking a very different question.
Namely—what can the history of the cost of performing the once-a-decade head count reveal about how government-run health care costs will behave? Will Obamacare be the exception to the runaway cost rule? Let's use the census as a yardstick.
To keep this analysis at its most simple, let us compare the rate at which the population increased with the rate at which the cost of counting it (the decennial census) increased. That sounds sensical enough.
According to Appendix A-1 of Jason Gauthier's 2002 study entitled Measuring America: The Decennial Censuses from 1790 to 2000, the cost to perform the census has risen over the decades at a rate staggeringly higher than the rate of the growth of the population itself. What does this mean? Simply put, that bureaucracy is obese. Morbidly obese.
Whatever the opposite of efficiency is, the cost of taking the census epitomizes it.
Consider this chart from Gauthier's study:
YEAR POPULATION CENSUS COST
1790 3,929,214 $44,377
1800 5,308,483 $66,109
1810 7,239,881 $178,445
1820 9,633,822 $208,526
1830 12,866,020 $378,545
1840 17,069,458 $ 833,371
1850 23,191,876 $1,423,351
1860 31,443,321 $1,969,377
1870 38,558,371 $3,421,198
1880 50,155,783 $5,790,678
1890 62,979,766 $11,547,127
1900 76,303,387 $11,854,000
1910 91,972,266 $15,968,000
1920 105,710,620 $25,117,000
1930 122,775,046 $40,156,000
1940 131,669,275 $67,527,000
1950 151,325,798 $91,462,000
1960 179,323,175 $127,934,000
1970 203,302,031 $247,653,000
1980 226,542,199 $1,078,488,000
1990 248,718,301 $2,492,830,000
2000 281,421,906 $4,500,000,000
2010 308,983,000* $14,500,000,000
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