I think less representatives are easier to bribe than more.  Moreover, the purpose of a representative is having your views represented.  With only 49 representatives, at least one state isn't going to be represented.  That's antithetical to a republic.
This message was last edited by the GM at 22:18, Tue 03 Aug 2010.

I said it is easier to have a relationship with 49- each of the 50 represenatives would have a relationship with 49 *other* represenatives. Fairly basic math...

I was assuming you meant the relationship with the people to their representatives, which is more important, in my opinion.

If a representative is elected because he says he's going to move for certain things, then he goes and does the opposite thing, that's a far greater concern than representatives disagreeing with each-other.

A tight-nit group of close friends might sound good, if this were an Oligarchy, but I desire my representative to place the interests of those who elect them before anything else.

Additionally, the larger the population gets, the more representatives the country needs.  What is the point of having a representative that barely represents the majority of the voters?

No, having less representatives would be as desirable as a Single-Party system.  Populations that are large enough need to have more than one representative, because the job of a representative is to represent the views of their constituents, and it is impossible for a single person to accurately represent the views of its people once the population reaches certain levels.

Thus, I find reducing the number of Representatives from 435 to 50 an extremely bad idea.

The importance of two senators per state is to protect the rights of states who are smaller and do not have as large of a population, in order to ensure that each state is represented.

The allotment of senators can be changed uniformly, according to the Constitution.  But again, given the power of the Senate to rebuke any other branch, I hardly think making them more familiar with eachother; better able to organize and conspire against the public for their own gain, less expensive to bribe en masse, etc, is a bad idea.

Instead, I'd recommend increasing the number of Senators to 4 for each state.  The larger the number of Senators there are, the larger the group intending to sabotage political procedure would have to be to cause slowdowns.

Decreasing the number by half would make it even easier for a close-knit group of stubborn idiots to grind things to a halt.

It doesn't need to be a close knit group of frineds, but teh fact that teh elections are held in seperate states with wildly varrying attitudes will already prevent that from happening. What *does* need to eb prevented is the development of ciques and infighting, which happens when the body of represenatives becomes overly large. The need is to find a middle ground and right now at this point in time the size of the governing body in the legislature is too large to govern effectively.

As to congress being only 50 you are right, I was writing too fast and the idea is for the Senate to be reduced to 50, the congress should probably be reduced to about 130 to 195, which is two to three times the size of the orriginal Congress.

Unfortunately this isn't the case, thanks to political parties.  Even if two people have radically different views, if they both serve party A they'll both tend to support the same things regardless; parties take away a politicians loyalty to their constituents and puts pressure on them to further their own party's hold on political power in the government.



This is not the United Nations, however, and a few Congressmen disagreeing with a bill does not stop it from passing in theory.  They'd need a certain percentage of the vote to stop a bill from passing, and even a certain percentage of the vote to filibuster.

Cliques will develop, and infighting will occur, regardless of the size.  However, the total size of the body does determine the relative affect cliques and infighting will cause.




Is a clique of 20 members determined to halt any legislature during the current administration more of a problem if there are 50 senators, or 200?  It seems pretty obvious to me that if you decrease the number of representatives people have, the really crazy ones will have stronger influence in legislature.  If Alaska elects an Anti-Miscegenation, Anti-Suffrage senator, I'd like to know that there's a chance for at least one other view to be represented in Alaska other than that one.

I don't see the troubles with congress to be due to "cliques and infighting" though.  The dem/rep divide isn't a personality clash, it's an ideology clash.  It comes from A) having very different (and frequently mutually exclusive) views on how the government should be run, and B) being rewarded at the polls for demonizing/attacking/no-working-with the other side.  I don't see that changing with fewer members of congress.  It's not that Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid just don't get along due to difference in working style, its that they have very different beliefs, and get rewarded for appearing to have even greater differences of beliefs.

Again, I'm not married to the current number of senators or reps, and I'm not necessarily opposed to changing the number, I'm just unconvinced it'll make all that much difference.

Right okay, scratch "clique" and substitute "cult" then; you know they're crazy when they actually refer to themselves in a Godwinesque fashion rather than having their more shameless opponents break the law.

Example: WLYM, or "Worldwide Larouche Youth Movement" (remember when Obama hugged the Queen?  Apparently that was a dead giveaway that he was a shil all along for the British New World Order!) _{Source: The little magazines they were passing out at my college, hilariously insane nutters}

What does that have to do with congress?

Here's an example of its relevance:

http://www.galvnews.com/story....wcd=2f86414adab095de

A majority vote in the House is required to begin the impeachment process; decreasing the size of congress would it make it easier for a majority vote to be made based on conspiracy theory rather than evidence.

There is a difference in ideaology currently in congress, those ideological issues tend to break down when you actually get to know people whose opinion is different from your own. Smaller legislative bodies tends to lead to more across the aisle familiarity, and actuial cooperation between the parties. The problem it solves is ideological isolationsim.

Again, though, I don't think the problem right now is the reps/dems aren't friends.  The supreme court only has 9 members, and by most accounts they all get along fairly well, but you still see a very clear ideological divide.  If you need 6 of the nine to agree in order to get any ruling out of them, they'd be as deadlocked as congress.  Also, the fact that congress is democratically elected compounds the problem, because the voters reward those who don't work across the aisle, and penalize those that do.  There are a good number of senators that used to be known as bi-partisan, but who have tacked very much away from that because they're worried about being re-elected.  At the end of the day, the problem is that american voters don't want the people they vote for to be bi-partisan--they want the people on the other side of the aisle to be bi-partisan.  They don't want people who compromise on their values, they want everyone to 'compromise' by accepting their values.  In my opinion, it's the political climate (ie, the voters) right now that is the problem, not the system or the number of reps.  You can see this in the types of campaigns being run right now.  There's not many (any?) politicians selling themselves as bi-partisan, or willing to work across the aisle.  The ideological isolationism in congress is an effect of the ideological isolationism of the voters, not the due to the number of reps.

*Some* division is good, it is the level of hostility and gamesmandhip being played with our country's future that is the problem.

In reply to silveroak (msg #158):

Can you give an example?  I can't think of any example in which decreasing the number of representatives in a Republic made things better; generally the "decreases" I can think of were a result of military coups by one of the parties, and they didn't stay a republic for much longer than that, except perhaps by name.
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(And note I'm asking for an argument for decrease in Size with a forward-looking time-line, since simply showing a inverse correlation between congress size and cooperation is not an example, even if it can be shown; Correlation does not equal causation.)
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Isolationism will happen even with a reduced size, since some ideologies require such isolationism and can't be reasoned with.

I say that this is inevitable regardless of size, and argue by percentages that increasing the size of the Assembly would lessen the effectiveness of gear-grinding tactics by the unreasonable representatives elected by unreasonable people.  By the very nature of the Cult, their numbers are small, and by increasing the number of possible representatives, the unreasonables will be more accurately represented in contrast to those who wish to make changes rather than just obstruct the legislative process.
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I must also put forward that, most importantly, the primary purpose of a representative is to represent the people of their given state.

Since 1911, which was the most recent time the number of representatives was changed, the population of America has gone from approximately Ninety-Four million to Three Hundred Eight million, I think we're long overdue for our congress to increase in size to better represent the country's diverse views.
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@ Tycho

Although, if you look at it from a purchasing point of view, with the increase in population not matching the increase in representatives for nearly a century now, I'd argue that this rising demand for representation from a static number of people able to represent them must be slightly influencing the choices.

Memes such as "don't throw your vote away", "a vote for X is a vote against Y",  and "Single-Issue Voting" would perhaps be lessened if this scarcity wasn't a problem, and there wasn't as much of a need to put all your money on either one extreme or the other.

No, examples are hard to come buy, as it cab be difficult to get a legislative body to effectively fire themselves. The best bet for getting it accomplished would be in stages, trying to garner enough votes from states which would not lose seats and postponing the effects to several election cycles in the future. I do wonder if we shouldn't subdivide our governemnt into regions and add a layer between state and national to affoard teh best of both worlds- closer representation and smaller governing bodies, but enacting that would require a massive overhaul and a new continental congress, which I doubt anyone would go for.

Some of the discussion in the politics thread got me thinking a bit about taxes.  There is a growing push for a flat tax, and some view a progressive tax as unfair.  I think a case can be made for such a view.  However, what do people think of the idea of including the diminishing marginal utility of a dollar as income increases?  In other words, a "flat utility" tax, which would be, in practice, a progressive tax, since to someone making $10k per year, losing 30% of their income means a much bigger change of life style than it does to someone making $100k per year.  Granted, figuring out how to quantify utility is no small trick.  And utility itself is an abstraction anyway, so doesn't perfectly match reality.  But in basic concept, what do people think?  Would a "flat utility" be a good idea?  Say, you pay taxes that would reduce the utility of your income by 20%?  (or whatever %--I have no idea what the actual amount should be, or would need to be to support our spending level.  For now I'm more interested in people's thoughts on the concept).  Setting aside practicalities of implementation for the second, is the idea one that people could agree to in concept at least?  Satisfy both those who want the wealthy to pull more weight, and those who want the tax rate to be fair?

Why does it matter? We have a parabola tax. The poor pay the little, the rich pay little, only the middle class pays a high percentage.

If you institute a flat tax and chop up those tax incentives, then, maybe, you'll start to have a fair tax system.

If your concern is you're taking food money, then only institute the flat tax on dollars above $20k (or whatever).

But one could make the argument that it's not fair; as the more money you have, the less valuable it becomes. A ten dollar bill is much, much more valuable to a man making ten thousand a year than it is to a man making ten million a year.

Taxation can only be based on objective value, not subjective. One could also make the argument that the man who gets paid $10,000 a year draws such a large sallary because he has put in effort to develop his marketability because money is important to him, and that accordingly teh $10 bill is worth more to him than the person who makes $10,00 a year, which s why he has collected so may more of them.
The point in this is that taxes have to be based on objective criteria, not how you presume someone else feels about something.

Yes, agreed.  Not talking so much about what we have now, but looking at alternatives which might be better.


I'm not necessarily opposed to that idea, though some in favor of a flat tax might be, I think.


Yeah, that's more or less what I'm talking about--diminishing marginal utility of a dollar as income increases.


True, we can only base it on objective criteria, but we can form a system which attempts to account for subjective differences, and acknowledge that it won't be perfect (but might still be better than not even trying).

Basically, what I'm aiming at here, is that for someone who makes $20k a year, doubling their salary to $40k will result in a major change of their lifestyle.  Someone making $2M getting a raise up to $4M probably wouldn't change their lifestyle as drastically (though it would certainly change), and Bill Gate's lifestyle probably isn't going to change much at all, no matter how much you increase his income.  Thus, just looking at the fraction of the income we pay misses hides the fact that for some people giving up X% of their income will be affect their lifestyle in a bigger way than it might affect someone else to give up the same percentage of their income.  Coming up with a system to quantify it all would be difficult, no doubt, but assuming for the moment we could come up with a decent approximation, is the basic idea one worth considering?

Silveroak, I'm not so sure he means subjective feelings. I think he means in terms of relative purchasing power.

Lets say a man earns $20k a year. That rounds off to about $1600 a month. Now, for whatever reason, he needs something that costs $500. 500/1600 = 31.25%. That $500 is nearly a third of his monthly income. That's a considerable amount for him.

Now, lets say someone who earns $1 million a year. That rounds off to about $83k a month. He needs that same $500 purchase. 500/83000 = ~0.6%. That same $500 doesn't even take up a percent of their earnings a month. Hardly a scratch in his purchasing power.

It would seem this would mean that $500 means much more in terms of one's relative spending power for the former than the latter. That $500 likely won't mean nearly as much when it only takes up less than a percent of one's monthly income than it would if it made up a third of one's monthly income. In that sense, taking the same from both really won't have the same effect. Each dollar taken from the poorer man affects their monthly budgets much more than each dollar taken from the wealthy man.

Would you disagree with that assessment? Is that fair?
This message was last edited by the player at 14:16, Sun 26 June 2011.

I understand that, however the fact that you are taxing a percentage of income means that regardless of relative purchasing power you are still taxing the same percentage (assuming flat % tax.
Now what I think he is saying is that what is being purchased is more critical and less luxurious at lower income levels, so 20% of 20,000/yr is likely to bite much deeper into necessities than 20% of $100,000 a year. There are two obviosu soplutions to this- the cost of living based index: each person is taxed based on (income-cost of living) rather than straight income so the same percentage exists but with a different zero point. The other alternative is to make the percentage logrithmic- you pay in taxes 3% times the base 10 log of your income in dollars per year, so someone making $1000 a year pays 9%, somoen making $100,000 a year pays 15% and someone making $10,000,000 a year pays 21%
Of course these are based on simple graduation by income, ignoring issues of trying to inspire reinvestment- unfortunately what we have now is a model which tries to do both in a very ineligant method- by taxing teh rich more heavilly then offering tax incentives to investment so that teh high end of the income scale gets a depressed actual taxation base, leaving the middle picking up te bulk of the taxes.
And then there is the problem that because investment incentive based tax breaks focus on capital gains instead of dividends in creates instability in the stock market.

here's a model that might work:
tax non-investment income at (actual income-$40000)*log10(actual income)*7.5%
if non-investment based income is under $40,000 then investment based income is considered non-investment income up to the $40,000 mark
investment based income is taxed at a flat 10%, capital gains at 60%
which should help stabilize the market so it is being driven by dividends rather than price speculation.
Money *invested* from non-investment income is deducted from non-investment income, as long as this does not bring it under $40,000 a year.

The $40,000 number can be adjustable for factors such as size of household, dependants, or changes in cost of living.

And minimum wage is lowered to $2 an hour.
This message was last edited by the player at 15:51, Sun 26 June 2011.

Why the log of income?

Other than that, it seems fair to me, as long as you do something to address all the tax loopholes and shelters.

because it then provides some serious incentive for those making lots of money to invest it basd on potential dividends without creating the futures- based investment schemes of today.
Which measn they are investing in actual production instead of financial schemes.
It also means that with capital agins having a potential taxation of 60% anyone making over $100,000,000 a year will be better off paying the capital gains tax than the income tax, since investing anything they make over $100,000,000 will lower the overall tax rate below 60%.

Warren Buffet writes on U.S. taxation of the super-rich:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08...super-rich.html?_r=1