Smaller Government!

On election night, I saw an interview with a newly elected Republican politician. In it, she said we should balance the budget by cutting spending. So, the news anchor proceeded to ask if she was going to cut program after program, amounting to a vast majority of the government spending. To every single program she answered no. Then she couldn't name a single government program that she was going to cut.

This is a shame, if Republicans want to be serious there are so many useless programs to cut. Programs which do nothing to make Americans safer, yet waste millions of dollars a year and intrude into the privacy of Americans. Near the top of this list is the TSA, although the DEA is right up there as well.

September 11th could only happen once. It is no longer possible to take over an airplane with box cutters. The passengers would fight to the death. Beyond that, securing the cockpit means that only a pilot is a real security threat to an airplane. Beyond that, there haven't even been any major bombings using truck loads of explosives, which are logistically way easier. Despite what people say, the terrorists are few in number and mostly incompetent. Even if a few planes a year got blown up by terrorists sneaking in bombs(an event that happens mostly in the imagination of paranoid people), so what? Nearly three million Americans die every year, we regularly have around 30,000 deaths a year from auto accidents alone. A few planes a year falling out of the sky wouldn't make the country so much more dangerous. There are far better ways to spend that money.

Luckily, people are starting to notice this fact. Forbes for example recently had an article arguing we should eliminate the TSA. Somehow I doubt any politicians have the guts to do the right thing however. Maybe they can at least eliminate these silly body scanners and pat downs though.