The First Hundred Days of the Obama Administration

[Alex]

Originally Posted by Moonliner

I don't know about Guam, But the District of Columbia is pushing for statehood and Obama is on record supporting it.

There are more people in DC than in Wyoming so admission of DC wouldn't significantly change the numbers (DC would get 1 or 2 depending on the method but wouldn't change the multiple).


To quantify the overtilt of geography in federal government:

Wyoming gets one elected federal position per 174,277 people.
Texas (California is not worst off) gets one elected federal position per 703,070 people.

Just looking at the House, the best person to congress ratio is Wyoming again at 522,830 people per congressman while Montana has 957,861 for their single congressman. But this skew is more agnostic to rural/urban nature of the state.

[sleepyjeff]

Originally Posted by JWBear

There is also this point:

We all have just one representative in the House. I think I'd rather have someone representing me that one out of 435 rather than one out of 11,000; someone who has 1/435th of the power rather than 1/11,000 of the power.

Ok, that is a good point.

Although, in a way, it kinda proves mine

[Alex]

Originally Posted by JWBear

There is also this point:

We all have just one representative in the House. I think I'd rather have someone representing me that one out of 435 rather than one out of 11,000; someone who has 1/435th of the power rather than 1/11,000 of the power.

On the other hand you get to have less influence in trying to select the representative you think will best represent you.

Would you rather have 1/100,000th the influence on someone who will have 1/11,000th the power or 1/900,000th the influence on someone who will have 1/435th the power.

Difficult to say where the line is since I think we would agree that having one representative in the House for the entire country would not be good. But having every single person in the country having their own representative in the House would also not be ideal. I sense a graduate degree in computational political science in attempting to model it.

[Snowflake]

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[Ghoulish Delight]

Originally Posted by sleepyjeff

I am going to a Blazer game tomorrow night....20,000 fans plus hundreds of employees will all be inside one building.

I'll leave it you to to organize a civil, productive debate amongst all 20,000+.

[Tom]

Originally Posted by sleepyjeff

I am going to a Blazer game tomorrow night....20,000 fans plus hundreds of employees will all be inside one building.

How many office's are there in the Pentagon?

With that many congresspersons, each one could concentrate on just one committee and wouldn't need a staff. As for their pay.....we don't need professional legislators; each one should be paid a stipend to cover basic living expenses while away from home and nothing more. No pensions, no 6 figure salaries, etc. Think of it as a sort of voluntary jury duty.

To the first part: Sure you can put 20,000 people in a building when all they have to do is sit there and not move. Once each of them has to have a desk, and an office, and staff... it adds up really quickly.

24,000 people work in the Pentagon. I'm not sure how many have their own office. But also consider: what's the annual budget of the Pentagon? Do you want to add that much to the federal government's budget?

And sure you can spread out congresspeople more when you have that many, but I don't buy that they could away without staffs. I doubt that one person could even read all of the legislation that gets considered, leaving no time to write any, or research any, or do anything else one might expect of members of congress (like listening to their constituents). And maybe you like the idea of non-professional legislators, but I think they're a disaster. The job is too big to do part-time, and won't be smaller with more legislators. There will still be just as many bills to vote on - actually a lot more, I'd wager, as you'd have a lot more legislators trying to make their mark.

Having said all that, if we, the American people, believe that increasing the size of Congress is in our interests, we should do it. But we should be aware of the costs.

[sleepyjeff]

Originally Posted by Ghoulish Delight

I'll leave it you to to organize a civil, productive debate amongst all 20,000+.

Dancers and free T-shirts may help

[JWBear]

From C-SPAN:

A House Member employs an average of 14 staff; ... House Members may not exceed 18 full-time staff, and 4 part-time.

With 10,000 in Congress, that would potentially equal 180,000 full-time staff alone! We would need to build 8 Pentagons to hold all the Representatives and their staff!

[Ghoulish Delight]

It would sure help the unemployment numbers.

[Ghoulish Delight]

Originally Posted by JWBear

From C-SPAN:



With 10,000 in Congress, that would potentially equal 180,000 full-time staff alone! We would need to build 8 Pentagons to hold all the Representatives and their staff!

Actually, it would make more sense to use the average count. So "only" 140,000. Not that that's better, just sayin'