"Pay to Play" Politics

Rocky Mountain News guest columnist, Bill Blomberg writes in SPEAKOUT (2/23/07), that Support for the Electoral College system would vanish, if the Federal Income Tax rate for each state was adjusted to equal a state’s relative electoral strength. Under such a plan, residents of states with big populations would pay lesser Income Tax rates while people in the smaller states would (proportionately) pay a much greater share of the national tax load.
Blomberg forgets that we live under a ‘Representative Democracy’ not an actual democracy. Congress is made up of 535 elected representatives not 300,000,000 voting individuals. In fact, those Congressional seats (and consequently the number of Electoral votes) are now and have always been, awarded based on relative population. The key word there being ‘relative’ as would be related to ‘representative’.

Under Blomberg’s ‘pay to play’ tax system, people would be financially motivated to move to the tax-subsidized states of: New York, Florida, Illinois and California, thereby further exacerbating the population disparity between the big and small states, which would in turn, further increase the tax incentives for folks to abandon the small states.
On the other hand, if states with the greatest populations were proportionately assessed for tax expenditures such as: national defense, low income assistance programs, education and administration, much of Blomberg’s tax disparity would be equalized. Perhaps those living in the big population states should be charged proportionately higher fees for: energy, food and telecommunications & programming services, since they produce so little yet consume so much.
Maybe the founders, who created the Electoral College, understood the value of ‘representative government’ as opposed to ‘a government of individuals’ and perhaps we should have the wisdom to avoid the temptation to tinker with it.