Counting costs

Well, the Census Bureau reports that it will spend about $1.6 billion less than was budgetd to count us all this year. Woo hoo. How grateful are the starving supposed to be for this little crumb?

This works out to about 11 percent less than the $14.7 billion appropriated over 12 years for the 2010 count, and 22 percent less than budgeted for this year.

[. . .]

This was still the most expensive census ever. For the 2000 count, the bureau's budget was $7 billion, but it underspent by $305 million, or less than one-twentieth of the 12-year budget.

Saying this "was the most expensive census ever"  is a bit of an understatement. I found this chart that lists the amount spent on each census since the first (non-inlation-adjusted, I think), along with the population at the time and a calculation of "average cost per person" for each census. For the first nine censuses, the cost per person remained in single digits -- from 1.13 cents in 1790 to 8.87 cents in 1870. The next nine were in double digits -- from 11.54 cents in 1880 to 71.34 in 1960. Then the jumps started getting dowright obscene. The 1970 census cost us $1.22 a person, the 1980 $4.76, the 1990 $10.02, the 2000 $15.99 and the 2010 a really obscene $46.93.

Nobody "saved" $1.6 billion They will have spent about $13 billion, wasting God knows how much of it.