Well crap, I broke my own ground rules… Sorry!
So here is a new thread to talk about other issues, outside the chamber.
A bigger legislature costs more money.
How much do we spend now? What is the marginal per-representative cost? Could staff-per-rep level go down?
That depends entirely on what the job of a representative is and going into that, I believe, violates your limitation on discussing whether more representatives is just on principle better.
First I was asking about the total cost of congress, a factual question. The other part about marginal cost does bring up more questions that go beyond this thread. I would guess that larger overall membership might reduce the need for staff per member, but other than that, cost per member would probably be similar to now, and marginal cost probably is not the best way to look at this.
However, you did bring it up, it fits this thread better than any of my other threads… So, do you know what it costs to run congress? Would increasing it by a factor of 10 be significant to the overall federal budget? Are we talking over a $billion a year?
If you increased the number of congressmen by 20 fold, there would be so many bills that you would never be able to get yours up for a vote unless you could attach your bill to some other “must pass” legislation or a larger bill that is proposed by the chairman of some committee. Very few other bills will be able to generate the organic support to make it to a vote.
It’s obviousl that if you increase the number of congressmen by 20-fold, Congress is going to have to work very differently from the way it works today. It’s just silly to think that an assembly of 8,000 members is going to function like an assembly of 400. Most likely in the enlarged congress promoting Bills will be a negligible part of an individual congressman’s activities.
So DagNation’s question of how cost-per-member would change in an enlarged Congress can’t be answered unless we first of all work out what the work of a member in such an assembly would involve, and how that would differ from the work they do today. To do that new work, they might need many more staff, or many fewer; we can’t say until we know what they would do.