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this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
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Doing some back of the napkin math.
US House of Representatives are paid $174,000 US Dollars Annually (https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/RL/RL30064)
If we assume that that number represents half of their total compensation (to include stuff like healthcare and any other benefit they get) that brings us to $348000 US Dollars.
The German Bundestag has 736 members currently and Germany has a population of 84,482,267 people (both pulled from Wikipedia) That means you have 84,482,267/736 = 114785.688859 people per representative. Lets round up to 114800.
The US has a population of 333,287,557 people (per Wikipedia) so we would need 333,287,557/114800 = 2903.20171603 representatives, call it 3000 to be easy.
So if we followed Germany's representation we would cost the US taxpayers 3000 * 348000 = $1044000000 so just over a Billion dollars a year to fund just their salaries and healthcare and stuff. That is an eye-watering number and larger than I expected when I started this stupid journey.
For context though, in FY 2021 The United States allocated $740.5 Billion dollars to the Department of Defense (https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/2079489/dod-releases-fiscal-year-2021-budget-proposal/)
So that is roughly 1/740 = 0.00135135135% of the Defense Budget. Seems more reasonable that way. I'd much rather fund more and diverse members of congress to actually do things that fund military contractors building bombs to blow up Palestinian children.
Anyhow not sure why I did that but it seems like it'd be fine to expand the House of Representatives if we think we can do it in an equitable way.
Let me know if I got anything wrong about the German Bundestag, I have no prior knowledge other than what you told me and what I grabbed from Wikipedia
And it's not just the salary for the representatives but they all also have a state-paid office and staff - so yeah...
There have recently been reforms to make the districts bigger to get less direct representation in total resulting in a smaller size overall.
I'd expect that especially with a 2-party system it's not as bad as you calculated though since the worst problem here is that a local party from Bavaria is winning almost all the direct representation spots there but gets way less votes in total in Germany which results to every other party sending way more people than they would need