RECKONINGS:   Paying the Price

              By PAUL KRUGMAN

                   Right 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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