Well, this proves my point. Here are three states with 533 counties between them. If each county has only 15 elected officials , that’s nearly 8,000 right there!
Well I am not sure where you get your information from but according to the US Census count of of 2000 they counted 25,375 places in 2000. this includes 9 different types of places.
I found this by doing a search for the number of cities in the US on goggle no i have not checked the information against anything but I plan to. the point is according to the census of 2000 there were only 3000 or so villages in the whole of the US. I am suspicious of this and all of these numbers of course but I thought you would interested in seeing this.
There is a zip file on the site i was looking at of the 2000 census you can get to it by going to this link.
The US Census considers New York-style incorporated villages to be “incorporated places,” of which they count 25,375 in the whole country. (If you look at the list, you’ll find your favorite New York village there.)
Remember that every state and the federal government defines a lot of these terms differently. The Census does their best to try to work with some kind of standardized definition of what a “place” is, but it’s difficult. There are all sorts of unincorporated “census-designated places” that may not even be recognized by the state they’re in, as well.
ETA: Although I’m not sure where I got the figure of 3000 villages in New York (that post is a few years old.) Upon checking today, it looks like there are 553 villages incorporated. The 3000 number may include unincorporated hamlets.
It is hard to believe that we have 500,000 elected officials in our country with all the budget cuts going on. If we “cut” just $20 a week from each of our elected officials that would be $2,000,000 a week, and $52,000,000.00 a year saved from our budget. Then imagine if we took $50.00 a week. That would be $130,000,000.00 saved. Now that is a great budget cut. See if our politicians would even consider that one. That is not a lot in the big picture, but with the government cutting budgets for rape crisis centers, Medicare, and so many other “necessary” offices, it seems that the cutting should begin with those making the cuts.
Cool beans. Guess you forgot that a great many elected officials aren’t paid at all. Judging by the date of the OP and your join date you probably won’t be reading this anyway.
Besides which, 130 million is a tiny, tiny budget cut, so small as to be lost in the noise. Come up with a thousand more ideas like that, implement them all, and then we’re starting to see some effect.
I wonder if the OP realizes that the House Speaker and Majority Leaders and Committee Chairmen were elected to be Senators and Congressmen prior to getting those other positions.
No, it is not. Well, for a small town it would be a great budget cut. But 130 million is almost nothing to the Feds, and you’d actually be spreading it out over the Feds, the States, and everything lower too.
Yup. Total government spending in the U.S. (local, state, and federal) is over $6.1 trillion. So cutting $130 million from total government spending amounts to a cut of around 0.002%.
It’s been almost three years. Has anyone actually read my original post yet?
I never disputed that there were around 500,000 elected officials in the United States. I said I didn’t believe there were 500,000 elected officials in the United States government.
I’m more impressed by the fact that he feels the government should reduce employee salaries instead of cutting funding for rape crisis centers and such. What exactly does he think these offices do? It’s public service - the employees are the service. The budget is pretty much salaries and office supplies. And he’s apparently arguing we shouldn’t cut back on the office supplies.
