Originally Posted by
SATTSO
Oh, I have NO doubt that from the perspective of those here it will be a disaster. From the perspective of most here, everything TSA does will be a disaster. When many have taken the position that the only thing they want from TSA is for TSA to be disbanded, then they have positioned themselves into never admitting TSA is successful at doing anything.
Want me to credit the TSA with success? Here's how. TSA's annual budget is $7BN. If that budget were cut in half, the savings would be $3.5BN. That money could provide (very good) health insurance to roughly 200k people (at $17.5k/year). If you make the very conservative assumption that having health insurance will mean than 1 in 200 of those people won't die that year, that's 1000 lives saved. That's 8 flights. Mark it down for the cost of the airplanes themselves, you're looking at maybe 5 flights.
So, unless you can argue that cutting TSA's budget in half would result in five more planes a year being destroyed in terrorist attacks, it's not a good use of our tax dollars.