> However its VERY hard to ignore the reality that essentially 100% of the US population has no difficulty, on average, kinda paying electric bills and property

> However its VERY hard to ignore the reality that essentially 100% of the US population has no difficulty, on average, kinda paying electric bills and property tax bills and phone bills. "essentially 100%" is an overstatement. Federal Reserve data (see e.g. Figure 12 here [1]) consistently shows that quite a few Americans have difficulty paying bills. For example, ~25% of surveyed Americans with a high school degree or less said they couldn't pay that month's bills. That number gets smaller with more education but is always 50-100% larger for black and Hispanic people. It seems reasonable to me that people juggling various overdue bills might not prioritize responding to a census that has 0 short-term positive impact. It also seems reasonable to me that we make an extra effort to count these people since the point of the census is to count everybody, not just people who are easy to count. [1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2019-economic-well-being-of-us-households-in-2018-dealing-with-unexpected-expenses.html https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2019-economic-we...