The Most Effective Aviation Security Measure is Boring

The price for hilarious optical illusions has gone up considerably since these 1960s comic book ads












From a Cato Institute post re: bodyscanning Captain Underpants:

If you’ll forgive a bit of frank cynicism, I predict we’ll end up debating body imagers because they’re big, flashy, sexy tech with lots of cool scifi visuals for the weekly newsmags and cable news shows to use. The anchors get to say “naked” a lot, and air travelers get to feel like they’re being protected by cyborgs from the future. Meanwhile, measures that actually enhance security, like reinforced cockpit doors, tend to be rather more boring and invisible to the average person.

Reinforcing cockpit doors was, indeed, an extremely pertinent countermeasure to the aviation terrorism threat, but also probably the least remarked-upon security measure taken since 9/11.

Why is that? Can't TV news producers make forced-entry attacks on airliner flight decks as visually interesting as millimeter microwave imaging devices? Can't they find anyone in their vast stables of talking heads who wants to debate the finer points of American Society for Testing and Materials criteria? (OK, probably not.)

Some of the reason might be the disparity in financial interest. Cockpit doors were a $40 million one-time cost (and the most cost-beneficial aviation security measure ever, according to this paper), whereas the TSA's favorite body scanner goes for $160K apiece and there are tens of thousands of potential sales at stake. But I suspect the bigger reason is that physical barriers are such a blue collar thing that news media producers fear they can't report on the topic without coming into contact with people who use tools for a living and get grease under their fingernails.

On the other hand, there is no end of techy types and civil libertarians who want to talk about body scanners, plus they get to imagine people with their clothes off.

From My Elite Island

The Cato Institute has brought me good news again: Federal Salaries Explode.

Cato's Director of Tax Policy Studies is just rehashing a USA Today story, but he adds his own touch of hyperbole.

[USA Today's reporter] finds that since the economy fell into recession, the number of federal workers earning more than $150,000 has more than doubled. The federal government has become extremely bloated and top heavy, even as families and businesses across the nation have had to tighten their belts. With 383,000 workers earning six-figure salaries, the government has become an elite island of overcompensated administrators immune from the competitive job realities of average families.

Elite island? I can't speak for every overcompensated Fed, but I work in distinctly ordinary Rosslyn, Virginia.

Federal government salaries are an old topic for Cato, and - while I acknowledge having a personal interest - I think their outrage is a bit over the top. Statistical comparison of the federal workforce with the general U.S. population is obviously irrelevant. Direct-hire federal employees are too few, too professional, too old, and too concentrated in a few high-price urban areas to be typical of the workforce as a whole. Moreover, there is the matter that most federal employees need to get and keep a personnel security clearance. Doesn't that requirement create a barrier to entry into the federal labor market with the likely effect of biding salaries up?

The Cato Institute could develop a free-market economic explaination for the level of federal salaries, which would possibly be of use to public policy makers. Or, it can just keep on bitching. Either way, I'll be cashing my paychecks every two weeks here on my elite island of overcompensated administrators.

Ka-Ching! Ka-Ching!

The Cato Institute has pointed out, with much indignation, that Federal Pay Continues its Rapid Ascent while private sector pay lags behind:

The Bureau of Economic Analysis has released its annual data on compensation levels by industry (Tables 6.2D, 6.3D, and 6.6D here). The data show that the pay advantage enjoyed by federal civilian workers over private-sector workers continues to expand.

As much as I feel like lighting up a Cohiba after seeing the above chart, I realize that the public-private pay disparity can't really be quite that large. The Federal workforce is comparatively very small (about 1.9 million out of about 108 million employees in the private sector), and is heavily weighted toward professional jobs (since everything else is contracted out), therefore head-to-head comparisons tell us little.

For another thing, the federal job market has a certain barrier to entry in the form of personnel security clearances. I'd love to see an economic study that quantified the monetary value of Top Secret clearances; when I was a contractor performing staff-like functions for the same office where I now work as a direct hire employee, we generally considered that a contractor job candidate who had a current, transferable, TS clearance was worth another $10,000 in annual salary. The need for many, possibly most, federal employees to have some level of security clearance certainly restricts the labor market, and that should result in somewhat higher salaries. The Cato Institute is a free-market economics kind of place, isn't it? Why don't they sponsor such an analysis?


p.s. - Regarding those Cohibas and other fine Cuban cigars that one often sees for sale while on TDY outside the United States, don't think of it as trading with the enemy, think of it as burning their crops!