I would be interested in what the voter/incumbent ratio is in those other democracies. I would be interested in their taxation model, and their services model. I would be interested if their leaders are directly elected or elector-elected. Obviously your two Senators cannot do everything that needs to get done, so are they going to appoint people to handle the local details?
Obviously it would be ideal to adjust details such as number of senators and etc. if there were no state governments. There are a lot of things that would need to be adjusted, but without the gigantic bureaucracy of 50 state governments a lot could be done.
We would end up with massive cronyism with 6 years to wait to get rid of them...if we could.
We already have massive cronyism in federal government, and this problem is significantly worse in many current state governments.
I think the local governments are incompetent and poor because the lions share of the tax money is going to the Federal government.
Interesting thought. The federal government will always get more tax money than the state governments. We have gone dramatically too far down that road to turn back. We are currently spending over 700 billion dollars each on military and social security. These two gigantic budget items are each a bit larger than the total tax revenue from all 50 states combined. These two items not going away anytime soon (admittedly, neither are state governments, so this entire discussion is basically moot).
We could afford and feel entitled to the best people in our local governments if they were the ones controlling the dispersment of tax revenues. Last I heard, the pentagon could not account for a trillion dollars. Thats a lot of schools, hospitals, roads, and jobs that were lost.
"Not able to account for" is not the same as "missing". But yes, I do not see any reason to argue whether the federal government is inefficient and/or spends too much money. This behavior seems to be a foundational requirement for all governments. My position is that state governments are more wasteful, and less functional than the federal government.
I do not feel inclined to give control of any more tax revenue to the state governments who have already proven to be inept and/or malicious in their handling of funds at a truly ludicrous level. I think the most logical conclusion, based on my observations of state governments, that if we transferred a significant portion of federal funds to state control, the currently pervasive financial misconduct would only increase by a factor of how much more money was available.