No; the TSA exists because we needed a government jobs program that was easy to promote under the guise of terrorism.

It's not nearly enough jobs to be a jobs program

caminante 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

By 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.

verall a day ago | parent | next [-]

By 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 a day ago \| parent [-]
		>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.

AustinDev 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

And they get Federal pensions and healthcare funded by tax dollars.

	▲	a day ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]

2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]