This is way off-topic for me, I know, but I wrote this on Notepad while sitting on an airplane, so maybe you'll understand . . .
Everyone gripes about the Transportation Security Administration. For good reason. As best I can tell, it is utterly indifferent to the inconvenience it inflicts with its picayune regulations. Has anyone seriously tried to estimate the cost of all of its security procedures? What's the annual cost of making passengers remove their shoes? Or of removing their laptops? Or of requiring them to buy 3 oz. bottles of deoderant and pack them in freezer bags? Or, for that matter, of all those humiliating behind-the-screen patdowns?
An average of 2 million Americans fly every day. An extra 1 minute waiting in security for each one of these passengers amounts to over 33,000 minutes wasted per day. You can multiply this by many minutes, I'm sure (especially when tourists are clogging up the security lines). And that doesn't include the scheduling cost -- having to arrive extra early to make sure you get through security.
Here's what I propose. Give TSA a budget. I don't mean an operating budget; it already has that. Give it an "inconvenience budget." Every year, Congress can authorize TSA to inflict $X billion worth of inconvenience on the traveling public. We'll entrust GAO or hand-picked economists to estimate the inconvenience cost of a given rule. TSA can then promulgate whatever rules it wants. But once it exceeds its budget, it's cut off.
I'm willing to be reasonable. We can let TSA check ID's and x-ray everyone for free. That's good value for the inconvenience. But it pays for anything beyond that. Require everyone to take off their shoes? Sure, TSA, but that'll cost you $400 million. Remove laptops? Just take another $500 million out of the inconvenience kitty. Forbid everyone from carrying standard-size deoderant or toothpaste? That'll be $100 billion gazillion dollars, please (this figure may be inflated, I admit).
Terrorist attacks are horrible, but security requires a cost-benefit analysis just like everything else. The cost of inconvenience should be out in the open, printed in the Federal Register. And the budget ought to be set by Congress after full and open deliberation and lobbying by all interested parties, rather than by a highly risk-averse, hide-bound bureaucracy. TSA needs to go on a budget, before it starts mandating full-body scans (which it is already testing) and fingerprint identification.
