The First Hundred Days of the Obama Administration

[Moonliner]

Like this?

[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.

[Snowflake]

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[Alex]

Yeah, I was being a bit flippant with making a new building the biggest thing I said and putting all the staffing issues under "infrastructure."

I do agree it would be an expensive hurdle, but also think it is lame that if more would create better government that we don't suck it up and do it.

[JWBear]

I'm just not convinced it would make for a better government. The inefficiencies would overwhelm any benefits.

[Alex]

Certainly an issue for debate. But as federalism fades I think it becomes increasingly important that there be some relatively local form of representation at the national level.

And more importantly, while I think geographic representation is important enough that straight up 1:1 representation shouldn't be the ideal, I think we've skewed way too far. Rural congressmen now wield too much power in relation to their urban colleagues.

So I could be convinced either way, but I think the complexity of expansion prevents it from being seriously discussed.

[Alex]

Probably not. Even if it helped the complaints we have now I'm sure it would produce new issues we despise just as much.

Ultimately the problem is that people aren't inclined to pay close attention to government involving more than a few thousand people and once people aren't paying close attention they'll eventually get screwed.

We could balkanize but I don't want use a passport to visit Sacramento.

[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.

[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.