The TSA Is Taxpayer-Funded Welfare For The Airlines
Bill Fisher wrote in February at TSANewsBlog about how the TSA, paid for by taxpayers, is largely a subsidy to the airlines -- which is maybe why they aren't squawking about it:
The TSA now costs Americans $8 billion a year and has cost approximately $60 billion since its inception. The FY 2012 Consolidated Spending Act (Public Law 112-074), signed into law in December, appropriated $7.85 billion to TSA, an increase of $153 million from 2011, and included funding to expand the deployment of body scanners to smaller airports.What has gone largely unreported is that all of this taxpayer expense has effectively amounted to a subsidy of the airline industry and is borne by many who seldom if ever fly. While an airline ticket now includes a $2.50 security fee (and that fee is about to go higher), up from $2 in earlier years, this is miniscule in comparison to the true cost associated with one passenger screening.
Based on the 2011 TSA budget of $8.1 billion and enplanements of 712 million passengers, the total cost per screening is $11.38, with the taxpayer contributing $8.88 of that for every airline passenger boarding an aircraft in the US. When the cost is distributed across the 144 million taxpayers in the US, the TSA adds an additional $43.86 to each household tax return.
If viewed in terms of the 7.15 million flights in the US in 2011, the security subsidy costs taxpayers an average of $1,133 per flight.
The major airlines are the primary beneficiaries of this government largesse. The 10 largest carriers received $4.8 billion in free airport security in 2011 while posting a collective profit of only $1.7 billion.
Delta and Southwest received nearly $1 billion in free security, while American, United, and US Airways received roughly a half-billion dollars or more in taxpayer-sponsored passenger screening services. Only United and Alaska earned profits that exceeded their portion of security expense, and the other eight carriers would have posted losses had they been charged their portion of security costs.
Airlines should be in charge of their own security for their planes and they should be paying for it.
(Here's the latest in TSA contract coziness.)
I'm not going to post my usual rant.
I just want one provable case that the TSA has stopped a single terrorist attack.
It was a one time operation that will never be repeated.
Jim P. at November 7, 2012 8:55 AM
If you look at the details on your airline ticket, you are paying for the TSA in the form of taxes and fees, generally two thirds of the "cost" of the ticket.
I am not a big fan of subsidies but if you are going to subsidize anything, real energy (not pie in the sky green) energy, and real transportation, (the kind that allows people to move products around the country, and do business) are not bad choices.
In a perfect world, the rent seekers would go away, but in the real world, the rent seekers and government have captured large essential parts of the economy, and will probably only give it back at the point of a gun...
Isab at November 7, 2012 9:11 AM
I'm dubious about calling that "welfare", in that the airlines themselves didn't clamor for this security-theater, and are only benefiting from it in the most nebulous and dubious way.
(In other words, to echo Isab, I'm not sure that they're the ones rent-seeking here... seems more like government-for-government's sake.)
I bet they'd be happy to have happier customers and pre-9/11 security procedures, given that the TSA is not providing them security, but the appearance of security.
Sigivald at November 7, 2012 10:32 AM
To continue, it hardly differs whether government taxes you directly, or imposes unfunded mandates on the airlines and airports to provide expensive security theatre. In the first the cost and pain are spread over all tax payers, and in the second, the mandate and costs go directly onto the users of the airline, the business and leisure travelers.
I venture to say, that if the entire costs of the TSA, and the FFA, and the overhead of operating the planes themselves were paid by the consumer, ticket prices would quickly rise to the point,where most of the domestic carriers would be out of business, without a direct government subsidy. So, by all means, let the airlines and their customers pay all the life cycle costs of operation, and a hefty carbon tax. Maybe the well connected can hitch rides with John Travolta.
Isab at November 7, 2012 11:33 AM
Consistency warning:
To say that airlines benefit from TSA action, you must show that ridership has gone up as a result.
It's not enough to show that the cost is not borne by the airline. Get the logic out and use it.
Radwaste at November 7, 2012 6:39 PM
The problem is that the TSA is the usual one-size-fits all solution that the government imposes on anything.
If the Fed had said to the airlines "You need to boost security so that 9/11 never happens again."
The response could have been armed guards on every plane, the passengers allowed to carry concealed, or open, wearing paper coveralls or any number of responses.
And the airlines could have grouped themselves that the CCW holder airlines went to terminal A and the paper coveralls went to terminal B.
Now we have this one size fits all solution that puts people that are barely fit to do pizza delivery, pedophiles and thieves in charge of security.
No that isn't right. Probably the large majority of the TSA employees starts out as decent people just doing a job. But the human tendency is to follow the "leaders" and the group eventually degrades to the lowest common denominator.
Just like George Soros became a NAZI collaborator.
Jim P. at November 7, 2012 7:23 PM
Sorry -- forgot Godwin's Law. I'm not trying to say the TSA is equivalent to the NAZI's.
It is just that many psychology studies have pointed out that people will collude, or not actively resist, as the rot at the center drops to the bottom. By that time, the rot on the outside is so deep, there is nobody to pull them back out without a major loss in some part on the reporting party.
Hence whistle blower laws.
Jim P. at November 7, 2012 7:47 PM
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