Jonathon,

If salaries are your concern, it looks like a red herring to me.

MikeH stated that 3,000,000 wanted one guy and 2,000,000 wanted the other. Obviously lesser numbers wanted other candidates running. I seem to remember that the margin for the winner was less than 1%, so maybe MikeH's numbers are a bit off.

Let's stick with the total MikeH quoted - 5,000,000. Let's further assume that the number represented 50% of eligible voters, so that there are roughly 10,000,000 tax payers (those who could have voted).

Letting the 'salary' of a Senator be $250,000. per annum gives a cost PER taxpayer there of around 2.5¢ per YEAR. So your two senators cost each taxpayer 5¢ per YEAR.

Now 100 senators would cost each tax payer there $5.00 per YEAR. That seems a very small price to pay for better representation, in line with what your founding fathers (apparently) had in mind. Drop a single cruise missile from the arsenal and those 98 new senators are more than paid for!


>In your message that I was responding to, you mentioned having 10-100 senators per state. That would be a huge increase in the salary needed to pay our government. And you're assuming that you can get them to reduce their salaries? I don't want higher taxes to pay for more government.
>
>In liberal states like Maryland and Massachusetts, we will have 4 Democratic senators instead of 2. How does that represent me better?
>
>>>Who is going to pay the salary of all these senators?
>>
>>The people who pay them now. They get paid 200K a year, so if, in 2004 we decided that they should get paid 150K a year (which I think is still 3 times the national average *1) and that there should be four senators from each state, we would be going from a $20 million Senate salary to a $30 million salary. Considering the war on Iraq will cost us about $200 billion, a measly $10 million should be swingable.
>>
>>Would that work for a start?
>>
>>*1 http://www.census.gov/prod/2002pubs/p60-218.pdf page 21