Excerpt Were he alive today, Franklin might have a less flattering saying for the bureaucrats running the 2010 census, which is costing taxpayers $15 billion — and rising. That’s $48 per person counted, compared with $16 in 2000 (about $20 adjusted for inflation) and about a penny in 1790 (or 24 cents after 220 years of inflation)... Chaffetz and others in Congress have suggested that instead of using $1 billion in stimulus money to help hire 700,000 new census takers this year, the Census Bureau could have relied at least, in part, on the 785,000 workers at the Postal Service,...