President Obama is expected to use his State of the Union speech to call for a five-year freeze on "non-security discretionary spending" in order to tackle our burgeoning national budget deficit.
The first problem with this is the word "discretionary." In my personal budget, "discretionary" spending is what I get to do for my own increased comfort and satisfaction, if there is anything left over after I have paid my essential bills. Recession-addled consumers know what our government seems not to: in an era of trillion-dollar deficits and God knows how much national debt, there should be no discretionary government spending in any category. Not even "security" as the government seems to define it.
That brings us to the second problem: the word "security." It seems that our government has forgotten that national security is about much, much more than just borders, airplanes, and terrorists. That mindset, coupled with the intent to cut all spending other than this narrow definition of "security," is what leads to a police state. Since 9/11, we have flirted dangerously with just that: with things like the Patriot Act, the Total Information Awareness Database, the Department of Homeland Security (please - does it get any more Orwellian than that?), and now, groping airline passengers and performing "virtual strip searches" in violation - I think - of our Fourth Amendment rights. This creeping Big Brother act has been not only ineffective and invasive, but extremely expensive.
A secure nation is not just one with strong border defenses and a capable military. It is one that also creates an environment where its citizens can have a reasonable expectation not only of physical safety, but also of economic safety, health, and the solid education required to chart a satisfying - or at a minimum, an adequate - course for their own lives.
This means we can't afford to neglect our schools, infrastructure, Medicare, Social Security, or WIC. What we can do is cut some of the insane post-9/11 bureaucratic creations, such as DHS or TSA.
DHS is really only a redundant and suffocating super-structure overlying or duplicating pre-existing agencies which - despite all of the post-9/11 criticisms - were doing their jobs just fine. Their pre-existing flaws, such as failure to share information, have not improved with the creation of DHS. Their great "failure" to attach imminent, screaming importance to reports that might have uncovered the 9/11 scheme was only a failure to pick the one actually significant report out of a tremendous river of other reports, all seemingly of similar importance; it is like trying to choose one grain of sand on the beach, as the grain to pay attention to. How much worse it is now, with newly created, redundant agencies all generating their own reports, and only spotty cooperation among them.
As for TSA: ordinary citizens are subjected to ever greater abuses, the most recent bordering on state-sanctioned sexual assault, and/or introducing passengers to radiation risks that have not been properly evaluated, regulated, or disclosed. I am especially uncomfortable with the thought of children being either groped or irradiated. And then there are the lines: passengers clumped together in long, slow-moving "security" lines are themselves a prime target for attack. And for all of this, what has TSA achieved? Not a lot, other than racking up huge expenses for machines of questionable safety and effectiveness (body cavities remain a serious blind spot, yet the government has no plans to go there), and royally ticking off the American public. Some will point out that other countries, like Israel, for example, have even stricter security measures. Two points on that: first, the Israelis are laughing at our rather juvenile TSA efforts; and secondly, I don't want to live in Israel. I want to live in America. A pre-9/11 America. And yes, I think we can go back again.
Remember, it was ordinary citizens who foiled the shoe bomber, the underwear bomber, and the Times Square bomber. Whenever the government crows that there have been no attacks since 9/11, keep in mind that Uncle Sam cannot claim full responsibility for his success rate: for at least some would-be attacks, John Q. Public was the one who saved the day. Not Uncle Sam.
So save yourself some money, Uncle Sam: let's go back to pre-9/11 America. Reduce the DHS and TSA bureaucracies, consolidate some of your intelligence agencies, reduce redundancy and stovepiping. If what we had before was broken, fix it; it was the wrong response to create more, more, and more government at greater public expense and reduction of public freedom. We are a government of, by, and for the people. If we keep our minds focused on that, we should be able to make the right decisions.
Copyright R.N. Phillips, 25 January 2011
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