What’s Really Going To Happen With A Census Boycott

For a little while now I’ve been puzzled by the conservative effort to boycott the census this year. On a very ignorant level I get what they’re trying to do. The census involves the government and personal information ergo if you’re one of those frothing-at-the-mouth-tea-partiers you’re going to try and get all your buds together and scream socialism as loud as possible. Still, in actuality, boycotting the census does more harm than good. Dylan Matthews explains:

Good old-fashioned tax evasion hurts people, but it hurts exactly the people the tax evaders are interested in hurting: poor social service beneficiaries in some cases, defense contractors in others, etc. Census non-participation does exactly nothing to reduce the power of the federal government; its sole real consequence is to increase the chances your political allies will lose seats in Congress. It makes one wonder whether the census alarmists know this and accept it for the larger principle of not giving information to the government, or if they just haven’t thought this through.

So if all goes well, these small-government-census haters will lose all their representation in the government and really their movement will die out. Some conservatives have realized this, like North Carolina Congressman Pat McHenry and has taken pains to get conservatives to fill out the census. Not everyone realizes where McHenry is coming from, such as Minnesota Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann who has been urging a mass census boycott for some time now. Luckily, her constituents don’t seem to be listening. The moral of the story? The GOP is probably not going to ignore the census in the end and liberals will be the disappointed ones.

–Jasper Hart