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Comment by big_chungus | Hacker News Reader

You think adding more people to the room in an already-dissonant chamber will make thing more coherent? We moved to a modified republic precisely because a huge-scale town meeting isn't practical.

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There are a bunch of good arguments here: https://www.thirty-thousand.org/

Hmm. I'd say the biggest argument I could see is that it would result in less stupid bills, e.g. fewer "bridges to nowhere". Maybe less federal bureaucracy. You probably shouldn't really be able to pass something if you can't convince at least 15,001 Americans. On the other hand, logistics would be an insane challenge, and you'd have a huge issue with the inability to have an actual in-person debate. Also, who wants to pay 30,000 people six figures a year? We'd have to stop paying them for it to be practical.

For reference, the current wage is $174,000/yr (a stupidly-high amount). $174,000 * 30,000 = $5,220,000,000. I'm severely disinclined to pay over five billion dollars per year (plus additional logistics costs) for pencil-pushers to sit around deliberating what bureaucratic idiocy they will next hand down from on high.

As a counter argument I say the place to skimp out on payment isn't in the people making our democracy 30k is a bit OTT in my opinion but 5 billion isn't that much in the grand scheme of the US budget coming in at just .1% of our current spending.

You are not going to be able to buy off 30,000 reps if you are a lobyist. More reps and less staff are the way to win back democracy.

It is probably cheaper to buy off a large number of low-power reps than a smaller number of high power ones

It might be cheaper, but it is going to be hard to organise.

Moreover, if the reps have fewer staff, they will probably rely more on lobbyists for research.

There's loads of ways to solve it though. Let them form groups and pool money to pay for analysts and staff as blocks or beef up the OMB to provide better faster analysis of bills and let them use those. The pooling makes a lot of sense to me because with groups that large you're going to have to form shared interest groups just to have reasonable length debates.

Not if actual experts get elected. With 30,000 reps you are going to get a wide variety of people elected many of who will know something about the world outside of politics.

If you include the staff there already are 30,000 reps, just that most of them are not elected. The current system is more like having 450 mini corporations running the place.

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