This is very encouraging, though I'm not at all confident that global managers and its ideologists (whom Krugman is certainly one its more prominent ones) will embrace it. I'm quite certain that it is not something that Bush et al will be willing as a ttradeoff for stepped up militarism...so what is in it for liberals to be so supportive of Bush's calls for war I wonder. At least during the years o f'class compromise' liberals got something in return economically for their support of the Military Industrial Complex...now?
Steve
nyt SEP 16, 2001
Paying the Price
By PAUL KRUGMAN
R ight now most Americans are focused on punishing the perpetrators.
But Tuesday's tragedy was partly self-inflicted. Why did we leave
ourselves so vulnerable?
For this is a tale not just of villainy, but also of penny-pinching
that added up to disaster and a system that encouraged, even forced,
that penny-pinching. It's a problem that goes beyond terrorism.
Something is amiss with our political philosophy: we are a nation that
is unwilling to pay the price of public safety.
In retrospect, our national neglect of airport security boggles the
mind. We've known for many years that America was a target of
terrorists. And every expert warned that the most likely terrorist
plots would involve commercial airlines.
Yet airports throughout the United States rely on security personnel
who are paid about $6 an hour, less than they could earn serving fast
food. These guardians of our lives receive only a few hours of
training, and more than 90 percent of the people screening bags have
been on the job for less than six months.
It didn't have to be that way. Last year a report by the General
Accounting Office castigated the state of U.S. airport security,
comparing it unfavorably with the systems of other advanced nations.
In Europe, the people screening your bags are paid about $15 an hour
plus benefits, and they get extensive training. Why didn't the United
States take equal care?
The answer is that in Europe, airport security is treated as a
law-enforcement issue and paid for by either the airport or the
national government. In the United States, however, airport security
is paid for by the airlines; not surprisingly, they spend as little as
possible. Don't blame them the fault lies in ourselves, for depending
on private companies to do a job that properly belongs in the public
domain.
There have been many proposals over the years to put the job in the
right hands. For example, in 1997 Robert Crandall, chairman of
American Airlines, proposed a national nonprofit corporation to handle
airport security. But such proposals went nowhere. They were too much
at odds with the spirit of the times, which was all about shrinking
the role of government, not expanding it.
And the spirit of the times was definitely against anything that
looked like an increase in government spending, unless it was
explicitly military. If you look at the sad history of precautions not
taken, again and again sums of money that now look trivial were the
sticking point. Back in 1996 a government advisory committee on
airline security recommended spending $1 billion per year about $2 per
passenger on improvements. The panel rejected the idea of a special
airport tax to pay for these improvements, arguing that since this was
a national security issue, the money should come out of general tax
revenues. But officials at the Office of Management and Budget warned
that the committee had "unrealistic expectations regarding the outlook
of discretionary funds" that is, don't expect politicians to come up
with the money. And they didn't.
This is an issue that goes well beyond terrorism. Last year Laurie
Garrett, the author of "The Coming Plague," followed up with a
chilling book titled "Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public
Health." The story she tells is ominously similar to that of airport
security: a crucial but unglamorous piece of our public infrastructure
has been allowed to fray to the point of collapse partly because we
have relied on the private sector to do the public sector's job,
partly because public agencies have been starved of resources by
politicians busily posturing against "big government." Don't be
surprised if it turns out that we have left ourselves as vulnerable to
an attack by microbes as we were to an attack by terrorists, and for
exactly the same reasons.
I hope we bring the perpetrators of last week's attack to justice. But
I also hope that once the rage has died down, Americans will be
willing to learn one of the key lessons of last week's horror: there
are some things on which the government must spend money, and not all
of them involve soldiers. If we refuse to learn that lesson, if we
continue to nickel-and-dime crucial public services, we may find as we
did last week that we have nickel-and-dimed ourselves to death.
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