The Daily Herald ran “Budget cuts, not bureaucracy, are TSA’s problem” on the Opinion page May 31. Froma Harrop wrote that the recent summary firing of the TSA director is not indicative of bureaucratic incompetence and blames the shameful airport security performance on budget cuts.
Why budget cuts? The true cause should be more widely understood as congressional thievery. In 2013 the airfare security fee charged on every airline ticket sold was raised from $2.50 to $5.60 and if a connecting flight is over four hours the ticket holder is tapped for the fee again. TSA budget cuts result from the theft of $13 billion by Congress from the ticket fees collected that they diverted to the so called “deficit reduction.”
Could it possibly be that the fee was over-increased to have more money for Congress to play with? Both sides of the aisle are culpable; Republicans for insisting on anything anti-Democrat and Democrats for not insisting on White House vetoes, backed up by their numbers. They play the game, back and forth and bureaucratic failure is swept under the rug once again because political parties are on the same side—theirs.
In spite of the theft of fees paid by the flying public, the TSA has still received more funding than ever before. The TSA’s own figures show that they received a 7 percent increase from 2006 to 2015 while the number of passengers screened fell 5 percent. If, indeed, the number of screenings has increased recently, in addition to demanding a complete TSA overhaul, we should demand that Congress return the $13 billion in fees that they diverted to the purpose we anticipated when paying them.
Diverted funds from fees and taxes (some bureaucratically imposed fees and some taxes approved by voters) are at the root of a lot of the demand for more and more funding at every level of government. In Washington state, the Legislature gives billions of dollars to Boeing who in-turn boasts about gifts to local programs, thus diverting public funds to causes not disclosed when the back room deals were made. The Legislature is off the hook for funding disclosure while buying votes without cost.
We are told that public funding of this private corporation is necessary to spur regional growth, only then to see vote proposals to raise car-tab fees, HOV lane fees, gasoline taxes and raise other tax lids to pay for the “underfunded” road system caused by the increased population and diversion of road funds to other endeavors. Now, Boeing uses a portion of the tax dollars received to buy three full pages in the Daily Herald to tell us how glad we should be that they are here to support social do-good programs, not to mention that this disclosure is intended to reduce criticism of the politicians funding them.
In Everett there is suddenly money available to pay for housing the homeless with no demands on participants and without going to the voters. Where did this money come from? It has to have come from diverted funds that were probably laundered by the “rainy day fund.” Next will be the plea to voters for maintenance funds to continue this worthy cause. Is this the way we want our tax dollars treated?
Herald columnist Sid Schwab will waste more trees with another rant about Republicans in his next column, but I think the better answer is to clean our political houses, federal, state and local, from Sen. Patty Murray to the lowest local offices as we do our best to depoliticize the White House.
For the record, I am not a Republican, a Democrat or a member of any other political cover for the Deep State. I was, however, forced to lie about that in order to have my vote counted in the presidential primary. That lie will now be subject to public disclosure to any nitwit wasting our hard to come-by, not yet diverted tax dollars.
Paul Friedrich lives on Camano Island.
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