4 ms·
No; the TSA exists because we needed a government jobs program that was easy to promote under the guise of terrorism.
by garciasn 7mo ago
No; the TSA exists because we needed a government jobs program that was easy to promote under the guise of terrorism.
- verall 7mo agoIt's not nearly enough jobs to be a jobs program
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- caminante 7mo agoBy what standard? Federal civilian workforce (ex Postal Service and Military) is only 3 million. TSA has 60k employees. That's a lot of permanent jobs.
- AustinDev 7mo agoAnd they get Federal pensions and healthcare funded by tax dollars.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- verall 7mo agoBy your own numbers - 60k employees just doesn't touch a jobs program in a country of 350M people. The point of a jobs program is to provide jobs. TSA was created to accomplish a goal - security theater (mostly), preventing another 9/11 (maybe more in theory than in practice), etc. The New Deal WPA, according to wikipedia, supplied about 3M jobs at its peak in 1938, when the population was ~130M. 2.3% of the population vs 0.017%. Also empirically - if it was a jobs program, it would be way better staffed..
- caminante 7mo ago>if it was a jobs program, it would be way better staffed.. You're saying it's not comparable to the size of the New Deal, the biggest jobs program ever in the US. That doesn't disqualify it from consideration as a jobs program as there are many jobs programs much smaller. Adding 60k to ~3 million is significant because it's permanent. These are low skilled workers (and security theater as you astutely say) mostly concentrated in large cities. Whereas the New Deal was temp jobs that disappeared once grants and funding disappeared.