Census Trivia

Sorry, but this is pretty much all I'm thinking about lately.

• The first U.S. Census was conducted in 1790.
• Approximately 47 million housing units do not return a questionnaire to the Census Bureau.
• The government hires approximately 650,000 around the country to perform the task of collecting unreturned questionnaires. This is the largest peacetime workforce assembled at one time.
• 360 million questionnaires have been printed. Stacked one on top of another, a pile of these forms would stand about 29 miles high — more than five times higher than Mount Everest. Stretched end to end, these questionnaires would circle the globe three times. That's a lot of paper. And that's only a fraction of the forms. You should see my dining room, transformed into my "office." Piles of forms everywhere.
• The above questionnaires weigh 11.6 million pounds and used 295,259 pounds of ink.
• Taxpayers would save 1.5 billion dollars if everyone completed and mailed back their census questionnaire. Receiving census forms by mail is much less expensive and saves taxpayers approximately $85 million for every percentage point increase in the national mail participation rate.
• It costs the government 42 cents to process a mailed-in questionnaire and an average of $57.00 if a census worker must go to the home.
• The national percentage of households who have returned their questionnaires as of today is 69%.