OK, how about this: the entire Federal judiciary runs on a budget about 20% less than the NYPD.

Or NYPD has more cops than Portugal has soldiers.

That's not weird is it? I'd expect a normal, peaceful society to have less need for soldiers than police agents, and portugal is approximately as large as NYC, and not as wealthy: makes sense their military is smaller than NYC's police. I'd expect it to be smaller than their police force too (no idea if that's true, though).

A quick google suggests 50k police officers and 33k soldiers - pretty unsurprising.

"This is bigger than that" or "this is smaller than that" are not particularly useful comparisons. I could use the same tactic to make the budget seem overblown.

The budget for the US federal judiciary is bigger than the GDP of 64 countries[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...

You neglect to mention that most of those countries are islands with a couple tens of thousands of residents.

The population of NYC may well be 5x higher than the combined populations of all of those countries.

That is exactly their point.

The point is pretty incoherent then, because they're proving that indeed it's reasonable for the federal judiciary to have a larger budget and thus not demonstrating that comparing budgets leads to absurdity.

That's not a convincing argument, because it's pretty reasonable for a several orders of magnituge wealthier country to outspend a smaller economy on all kinds of stuff (including their entire GDP).

Do you have a better example?

~ $25/citizen.

Edit: For reference, the UK spends roughly $150 per capita.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1098367/justice-spending...

On a judicial system that covers a lot more than the US Federal Judiciary. Most cases in the US are run by state judiciaries.

The UK doesn't have a federal form of government. The fair comparison would be to add in the cost of municipal and state-level courts.

California spends about $65/citizen.[1] $90/citizen seems to compare favorably to the U.K., at least in terms of outlays. It could also simply evidence that the U.S. judiciary is underfunded.

I'm assuming the Ministry of Justice figure is exclusive of prisons. If the figure includes prisons, which cost ~$85/citizen in the U.K.[2] then court system expenditures would be greater in the U.S. (~$90) than the U.K. (~$65).

[1] $2.5b over a population of 39 million. https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4097#:~:text=The%2020....

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/298654/united-kingdom-uk...

MoJ in the UK runs prisons, courts and probation service.

So what? You can be charged or sued directly in federal court.