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Travel restrictions come with high price
Commentator David Frum.
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TEXT OF COMMENTARY
KAI RYSSDAL: Detroit's would-be Christmas Day bomber was indicted today. Omar Farouk Abdulmutallab was charged with attempted murder, possession of a firearm and four other counts.
Commentator David Frum says when you add everything up, this case is really gonna cost us.
DAVID FRUM: Let's do a little aviation-security math.
In the year ending September 2009, there occurred a little under 710 million departures from U.S. airports, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics.
Let's hypothesize that the typical air passenger's time is worth $50 an hour, twice the average hourly pay.
Now let's add an extra 15 minutes screening delay at the security gates to every flight. How much did we just spend? It's not a complex formula. It works out to almost $9 billion.
Add 30 minutes, and we've spent almost $18 billion.
In these trillion-dollar days, that may not sound like much. But it's still money. The entire University of California system, the nation's greatest, costs only slightly more at $19 billion.
Unlike university funds, wasted money never shows up in a budget. It's experienced person by person, enterprise by enterprise.
Yet, that cost is exacted by deliberate political choice.
There are two ways to do aviation security: either look for bombs or look for terrorists. Looking for terrorists is easier. Out of 100 passengers, there can be at most 100 terrorists. But among them, these hundred passengers offer thousands of possibilities for secreting a bomb.
And every time federal authorities are embarrassed by their failure to intercept a known terrorist suspect, they compensate by hunting ever more furiously for hidden bombs.
It's expensive. It's dumb. And it's bad security. But it's the line of bureaucratic and political least resistance. No tangling with civil liberties groups. No complaints from anti-discrimination lawyers.
So who dares say that all those hard-working men and women in the screening lines are looking for the wrong thing, in the wrong way?
RYSSDAL: David Frum is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Mr. Frum is right We nedd to look for terrorists not for bombs. We as a nation are wasting time and money on things that could easly be fixed by lokking for people who are going to be more likely to be a terrorist. Kids and Seniors aren't going to have a bomb, so why check them like they are going to have one?
Well done. I'm glad to hear someone else thinks the current security aparatus is an ineffective nuisance.
Unfortunately, effective security requires profiling your passengers -- which comes at a political cost. But, some passengers are more suspect than others. It's often unpleasant to be on the receiving end, but asking all passengers to give up their water bottles, take off their shoes and fold the strollers of their sleeping babies is plain silly.
The Israelis have managed to create tight security while allowing their passengers basic comfort.
As long as we're playing around with pointless numbers, how much money do we lose annually by keeping all those travelers offline while the plane is in the air? And how much money will we "save" after Amtrak deploys wireless Internet on Acela?
It was very long after DB Cooper hi-jacked a plane in 1971 that there was nearly a hi-jacking every week. The cost to the economy and airlines specifically was enormous. Now because of all that screening, the last hi-jackings were 9/11. Mr. Frum needs to add the success of airport screenings into his equation.
Mr. Frum was part of the Bush Administration at the time all of the measures against which he rails here were put in place.
So, he favored such inefficient anti-terrorism measures when he was part of a Republican administration, and now that a Democratic administration is in charge, he opposes them.
Can you say hypocrite?
I would have to agree with Mr. Frum, had we been putting together the intelligence, especially something as obvious as the young man's father alerting our embassy, we could have simply revoked his visa, stopping the terrorist with no need for full body scans or other knee-jerk procedures.
Mr. Frum's commentary is vaguely worded, but seems a call to reduce or suspend civil liberties when boarding a plane.
Bravo!
Why stop there?
Next stop: David Frum and his ideological confreres. Almost all my friends agree that their distorted ideology is a root cause of conflict with Islam and exacerbates it. Let's review every distortion they utter and cull it carefully, without regard to civil liberties, such as the First Amendment.
A personal note to Mr. Frum. I live in the orbit of the Peoples' Republic of Berkeley. I want left wing ideologues muzzled too. So don't take it personally.
"It's expensive. It's dumb. And it's bad security."
Very true words. It is time that we actually admitted that the current airline security system doesn't work. Even worse it is poor customer service and a terrible way to treat the flying public. Many of these people are forced to fly to keep their jobs, and may not even have a choice to avoid the abuse.
We should stop looking for a needle in a haystack and accept the tough job ahead. It is time to stop burdening the non-violent public because we cannot face the political pressure and do what is right.
