Terry Jeffrey, at Town Hall, finds that the Obama Administration is already selling the 2010 Census as a welfare project.

The Constitution mandates that a census be taken every 10 years so that the members of the House of Representatives can be apportioned among the states according to their population.

But as the Census Bureau prepares to undertake the 2010 census, it is planning to stress a far different purpose for the population count, according to its own carefully crafted communications plan.

This plan is detailed in a 351-page Census Bureau document titled “2010 Census Integrated Communications Campaign Plan” that is posted on the bureau’s Website.

On page 10 of this plan, the bureau states that the “unifying idea for all communications” about the 2010 census is: “Only you can make the census ours.”

It says that this idea will be “expressed in the marketplace” through the phrase, “It’s in our hands.”

“This is the broad, overarching platform, unifying all messaging,” the plan says of the phrase, “It’s in our hands.”

Now, these phrases may look to you like lyrics from a Barry Manilow song, but to the people running next year’s constitutionally mandated count of all people in the United States, they are very serious words. …

On page 29 of its plan, the Census Bureau explains “What ‘Only You Can Make the Census Ours’ Means” — doing so in the imagined words of a U.S. resident being asked to participate in the census.

Participating in the census, it turns out, is all about “change” and “more funding.”

“I have an opportunity to help make a difference for my community, my family and myself,” says the imagined resident. “It’s literally in my hands, in the form of the 2010 Census questionnaire. The Census is much more than a piece of paper. It’s a tool that I can put to work to ignite positive change.

“My participation in the 2010 Census can be the tipping point that helps make change possible,” says the Census Bureau’s imagined U.S. resident. “And the more of us who fill out and mail back the Census, the more of us who want to tell a friend, to tell a friend, to tell a friend, the more funding we might get to help improve our lives and the lives of those who are important to us.”

In other words, the person the Census Bureau imagines it is targeting with its communications plan is not someone who looks at himself as a net payer of taxes but someone who looks at himself as a net taker of government funding.

It’s really about making the contents of your wallet “theirs.”

The Obama Administration has an answer: release them in the United States and put them on welfare. Before long, presumably, ACORN will be taking them to the polls to vote democrat.

Thomas Joscelyn quotes a news agency report and comments.

Bad as the democrat stimulus package is on the surface, Charles Hurt notes that it contains a covert clause with far-reaching ramifications.

Buried deep inside the massive spending orgy that Democrats jammed through the House this week lie five words that could drastically undo two decades of welfare reforms.

The very heart of the widely applauded Welfare Reform Act of 1996 is a cap on the amount of federal cash that can be sent to states each year for welfare payments.

But, thanks to the simple phrase slipped into the legislation, the new “stimulus” bill abolishes the limits on the amount of federal money for the so-called Emergency Fund, which ships welfare cash to states.

“Out of any money in the Treasury of the United States not otherwise appropriated, there are appropriated such sums as are necessary for payment to the Emergency Fund,” Democrats wrote in Section 2101 on Page 354 of the $819 billion bill. In other words, the only limit on welfare payments would be the Treasury itself.

“This re-establishes the welfare state and creates dependency all over the place,” said one startled budget analyst after reading the line.

In addition to reopening the floodgates of dependency on federal welfare programs, the change once again deepens the dependency of state governments on the federal government.

William Voegeli, in the Fall edition of the Claremont Review of Books, argues that Americans ought to think rationally about the American Welfare State.

Voegeli contends that, though conservatives will never succeed in repealing the New Deal, the public is fundamentally unwilling to pay for significantly greater expansions, the problem of persistent poverty really stems from causes federal money cannot effectively address, and meanwhile ideology and illusions prevent sensible allocation of limited resources.

In a society that is remarkably prosperous by global and historical standards, shouldn’t “most vulnerable members” be construed as referring to the most vulnerable 5, 10, or 25% of the population—not just the abjectly miserable, let us concede, but people confronting serious threats or problems? Yet when it turns out, time and again, that the effective meaning of liberal welfare and social insurance programs is to elicit compassion and government subventions for the most “vulnerable” 75, 80, or 95% of the population, it’s hard not to feel scammed. …

.. Paul Starr of Princeton University and the American Prospect, says the welfare state is about the poor. Its “objective should be, above all, to eliminate poverty and maintain a minimum floor of decency to enable individuals to carry out their own life plans.” But giving benefits to everyone, not just the most vulnerable, serves social and political purposes. Socially, “the long-term tasks of nation-building and of fostering a common culture and a sense of shared citizenship also strongly argue for public and universal schooling, old-age pensions, and other services that serve an integrative as well as egalitarian purpose,” according to Starr. Politically, the imperative to construct democratic majorities that support programs for the poor “will often mean support for programs that provide universal benefits.” We may say that such programs “target” the most vulnerable 100% of the population.

Read the whole thing.