Is there a cost-accountant on this Board?
This isn’t a political question, or a snarky one (Q: how much does it cost to buy a Congressman’s vote? A: How much have you got? Hahaha!). One hears on the news that it has cost the US House of Representatives some $52M in total to vote 37 times to attempt repeal the Affordable Care Act, ie Obamacare, or approximately $1.3M per round of voting.
Doesn’t that figure seem way to high? How did they compute it? What math did they use? Can we make them show their work? Other than gathering the congresspeople together and counting the votes, what else is there to do? One would think they could accomplish the act of voting and of tallying up the results a hell of a lot cheaper than $1.3M per event.
Can anybody shed some light on this for me?
I would guess the biggest cost is the congressmen’s salary.
Even more than the salaries of the members of the House, you have to include the costs of all of the staff and aides. If a vote extends into the evening, there are costs for overtime for staff.
Here’s an article from last year where they calculated it out.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/11/health-care-law-repeal_n_1666917.html
Basically, 80 hours of floor time spent on the bill, and it cost 24 mil a week to operate the House of Representatives. Which is a little disingenuous because it assumes all the money is being used by the repeal votes.
If that’s how they computed it, it isn’t “a little disingenuous,” it is a completely bogus figure. Assuming they spent 80 hours of floor time on it the first time (which I doubt), they sure as hell didn’t spend another separate 80 hours of floor time on it each of the subsequent 37 (or 38 or 42 or whatever) times they voted on it.
Well, there’s a long and proud tradition of citing completely bogus figures as the “cost” of something.
A classic case is overseas deployments and wars. Typically someone totes up the salary of all the troops involved even marginally, and the cost of feeding them, and a bunch of other costs like maintenance and fuel. While some of that is no doubt higher due to the event in question, it’s not like we stop paying, feeding, housing, and driving around the troops in peacetime, so a lot of the cost is already a sunk cost even if the event had not happened.
Right. The cost of running Congress whether there are no votes in a week or a hundred votes in a week is probably indistinguishable. The congressmen get paid a salary, I would bet you anything that most of the staff are exempt (thus not eligible for overtime), and so we’re down to talking about the cost of electricity and printing costs for bills and amendments.
The marginal cost of voting fifty more times on Obamacare – as opposed to voting on anything else – is almost certainly zero. The marginal cost of voting fifty more times – as opposed to voting on nothing at all – is probably a three or four digit number. But that’s just a WAG.