The TSA is a discussion proof issue. Their mission is to make all transportation safe -- which is prima facie insane.
When we have a political discussion about any other government agency, there are usually some kind of stats we can judge our expenditures against. Need more police? Maybe so. What's the crime rate look like. Need increased defense spending? I don't know. What's the defense spend of other countries. And so on. [Insert long discussion here about whether such metrics are useful or just BS, but the point is that there are numbers, sorta]
With the TSA, we're protecting them from something not happening that's only ever happened once in our history. If we spend 100 Billion over the next ten years and there are no attacks, was that money well spent? Who knows? Maybe we should spend twice that, or half that.
I'm not even going to go into the civil liberties problem. From a funding discussion alone, there's simply no way to know if we have "not enough", "just right", or "too much"
And so we end up with this kabuki theater, where we pay untrained people to go through the motions of looking like they might be doing something useful.
Politicians have a tendency to create issues that only have one side to them. So we have "Mothers Against Drunk Drivers" -- anybody know people in favor of drunk drivers? Or people in favor of "clean water" -- is there a political group actively lobbying for dirty water? We create these edge cases where the way the issues are framed, reasonable discussion becomes impossible. This is the case with the TSA.
Politicians have a tendency to create issues that only have one side to them. So we have "Mothers Against Drunk Drivers"
'Mothers' against drunk driving' was created by a woman whose daughter was killed by a drunk driver and who was the subject of a TV movie about the death and her subsequent activism. Likewise, there are people who lobby for clean water because their local water supply has become polluted, typically by agricultural or industrial concerns in a 'tragedy of the commons' situation where the externalities of production are not billed to the producer.
I don't understand why you're ascribing the existence of such lobbies to politicians. Nobody campaigns for dirty water, but there are plenty of politicians who speak against the EPA and implicitly support their constituents' wish to pollute for free.
"When we have a political discussion about any other government agency, there are usually some kind of stats we can judge our expenditures against"
Usually those stats are ignored. You brought up good examples:
"Need more police? Maybe so. What's the crime rate look like"
More like, "I can be tough on crime, so let me fund more cops!" The crime rate has been declining lately, but the police are more powerful than ever before. Paramilitary teams are routinely used to serve search-and-arrest warrants, the police can recycle the proceeds of seized property into their own budgets, and there are more and more ways for us to become criminals with each passing year.
"Need increased defense spending? I don't know. What's the defense spend of other countries"
Once upon a time, we only spent substantial money on the military when we were in a state of war. Then we began to panic over the USSR's military might, so we created a standing army. Now there is no USSR and we have the most powerful and well-funded military on Earth. Despite the changes in other countries' military sizes and budgets, our standing army faces more budget cuts from failures to compromise on the domestic budget than any sort of quantitative comparison with other countries.
The thing about the executive branch is that it is constantly trying to get more power, and the legislative branch is constantly giving more power to the executive. The old protections against executive abuses are being eroded, and new ways for the executive to act without democratic process are being created. Declare drugs to be illegal without consulting Congress? Sure. Shoot and kill American citizens hundreds of miles from any battlefield? Of course! Expanded the military presence in countries that never threatened or attacked us? Why wait for Congress on anything? The only politicians who are even trying to stop this are outsiders, libertarians and the far-left whose ideas are nowhere near the mainstream.
"With the TSA, we're protecting them from something not happening that's only ever happened once in our history."
The issue here is that there was never actually a problem for the TSA to address. America does not have an ongoing problem with terrorist attacks; every few years we see one very determined attacker manage to cause a lot of destruction, and otherwise we go on with our lives oblivious to the numerous ways we can be attacked. Other countries are not so fortunate: they have to deal with terrorists attacking garbage cans, buses, markets, etc. They can judge their policies by reductions in such attacks.
Bruce Schneier has a good point: instead of an agency meant to secure transportation against rare and unpredictable attacks, we should fund an agency meant to make transportation generally safer. We have lots of car accidents each year; once upon a time, we addressed that by mandating seatbelts as a standard feature. Why not continue to develop safer cars? If we are no longer creative enough to do that, why not spend the money on making alternative modes of transportation easier, cheaper, and more available? We can determine the success of such a policy by the reduction in vehicle-related injuries and deaths.
When we have a political discussion about any other government agency, there are usually some kind of stats we can judge our expenditures against. Need more police? Maybe so. What's the crime rate look like. Need increased defense spending? I don't know. What's the defense spend of other countries. And so on. [Insert long discussion here about whether such metrics are useful or just BS, but the point is that there are numbers, sorta]
With the TSA, we're protecting them from something not happening that's only ever happened once in our history. If we spend 100 Billion over the next ten years and there are no attacks, was that money well spent? Who knows? Maybe we should spend twice that, or half that.
I'm not even going to go into the civil liberties problem. From a funding discussion alone, there's simply no way to know if we have "not enough", "just right", or "too much"
And so we end up with this kabuki theater, where we pay untrained people to go through the motions of looking like they might be doing something useful.
Politicians have a tendency to create issues that only have one side to them. So we have "Mothers Against Drunk Drivers" -- anybody know people in favor of drunk drivers? Or people in favor of "clean water" -- is there a political group actively lobbying for dirty water? We create these edge cases where the way the issues are framed, reasonable discussion becomes impossible. This is the case with the TSA.
The TSA needs to be abolished. Immediately.