Free Republic

In the home stretch of the 2012 presidential campaign, from August to September, the unemployment rate fell sharply — raising eyebrows from Wall Street to Washington. The decline — from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent in September — might not have been all it seemed. The numbers, according to a reliable source, were manipulated. And the Census Bureau, which does the unemployment survey, knew it.

Barack Obama is set to begin his second term, new statistics on America’s poverty rate indicate that nearly 50 million Americans, more than 16 percent of the population, are struggling to survive. New figures released by the Census Bureau this week found a spike in poverty numbers last year, going from 49 million in 2010 to 49.7 million last year. The numbers may come as a surprise to Congress, which estimated in September that the poverty rate would drop to 46.2 million.

It’s as old as the Bible, the taking of a census. The ancient Romans did it. Medieval England did it. It’s written into our Constitution that a census be conducted once every 10 years, and yet, every 10 years, the idea of the government counting the population breeds varying levels of controversy, fear and suspicion. Which, in a way, is normal; distrust of intrusive government is encoded in the American DNA. “We’ve been doing this 200-odd years,” says census historian Margo Anderson, “and every decade, there is some issue with the census. Because it’s a fairly rare event, when the...