You can tell it’s an election year, because the price incumbent congressmen are willing to pay for a vote seems to be near an all time high.

Congress just passed legislation that is expected to help 400,000 homeowners who risk having their homes forclosed on. The measure includes $3.9B in grants to acquire already forclosed homes from banks, $180M in pre-forclosure counciling, and $15B in tax credits.

By my count, that works out to be $19B in the hopes of securing 400,000 reelection votes, or $47,500.

That seems pretty high to me. It’s probably safe to assume that the households this helps often contain more than one voter. Figure 1.5 voters per household, we are at $31,666. That seems high. I wouldn’t be suprised if the price of votes is being pushed up significantly by those damn speculators we’ve been hearing so much about.