Monday I received a letter from the US Census Bureau telling me I
willl receive another letter in about one week. Mailed first class,
printed in 5 languages and sent to 120 million households.

Minnesota Public Radio’s Bob Collins did the math and came up with
these numbers:

"There were 105,480,101 households in 2000. At 500 sheets of paper
per ream, that’s 210,960 reams of paper for the letter. It’s cheap
paper, though. At $40 a case, Office Max has the cheapest price I
could find online, so that’s $843,000 for the paper.

Five-hundred envelopes go for $30. That’s another $6.3 million
(I’m rounding up and down here; it’s the government afterall).

Finally, there’s the cost of mailing. It’s presorted first-class
mail. According to the U.S. Postal Service Web site, pre-sorted mail
costs .335, although a standard rate letter could be sent for 17
cents. But this was first-class. Total: $35,335,833.83.

Total: $42.5 million to send you a letter to tell you you’re going
to get another letter next week. Oh, and sending a postcard would’ve
been $15.8 million cheaper.

The average person pays $13,000 in federal taxes per year. So it
took the annual federal taxes of nearly 327 taxpayers to send you the
letter."