In a matter of a few days, our public servants have solved the “crisis” at the FAA in perhaps the most vivid example of bipartisan cooperation (two words that, used in sequence, ought to make all the citizenry nervous, but I digress) many people can remember. The solution these estimables reached appears quite simple to anyone who lives outside Washington , D.C.
Two thoughts spring immediately to mind.
First, what we witnessed was a transformation from political allocation of funds to a practical allocation of funds. Initially, the cuts to the FAA budget, like all sequester cuts, were designed to inflict the most possible pain in order to force the political parties to the table to address the sequester and, ultimately, the budget problems over which that sequester was to serve as a flimsy band-aid. With yesterday’s Congressional action, the FAA was allowed to allocate funds to inflict the least possible pain on the traveling public. Contrary to much popular opinion, people who work for the government are not stupid, or at least any more stupid than the rest of us who elect their nominal bosses, i.e., the elected officials. Those nominal bosses are vainglorious, pompous, ingenuous and perhaps themselves a tad slow, but the people who do the actual work for the government are not. The managers and workers at the FAA are perfectly capable of rationally allocating a limiting budget; it was the politicians who kept them from doing so. The obvious conclusion is that the government and the people who work for it and/or pay its bills can live with reduced budgets. It’s the politicians who can’t.
Some are asking, with an understandable degree of vehemence, why the FAA is entitled to such “special treatment,” i.e., the ability to manage its own budget, while other functions of the government, such as the military, Head Start funding, and senior nutrition programs, are not. I wholeheartedly agree; why not permit the people who run these programs, less visible but arguably at least as important, the same flexibility that the FAA has been granted? That would make sense…to you and me, but not to the politicians. They continue to insist on political allocation of funds because that is what they do in their isolated little world…until the heat from the outside gets too intense.
Second, the logical and rational response to the heightened inconvenience to fliers brought about by our public servants’ childish games would be to simply not fly. I’ve brought this up before in another context (See my now seminal 4/21/11 post in the Insightful Pontificator entitled “IS THIS ANY WAY TO RUN AN AIRLINE?”) and got a lot of blowback, most of it friendly but some of it not, but I’ll repeat my point: Almost all flying is unnecessary. Pleasure flying is, by definition, unnecessary. Though one could argue (and I might not) that everyone needs a vacation, one does not have to fly to one’s destination. There are plenty of places to go that aren’t across oceans and thus don’t require flying. And, with modern communication devices, just about all business flying is unnecessary. Meetings, conferences, etc., if they are indeed meetings and conferences and not just excuses to spend time in nice resorts on one’s employer’s, and the government’s dime, can be done over the internet or in some similar way. There may be some pompous clients who insist that potential vendors pay tribute and convey obeisance in person, but who needs to deal with such popinjays? I, for one, would insist that anyone who wants to do business with me show enough fiscal responsibility not to pee away money flying out to see me. Not only is such good sense admirable, but I know that I, as a customer, am ultimately paying for such frivolous flights.
Even those who don’t share my unrestrained, overflowing, nearly indescribable joy at tooling down the open road have a ready alternative to the inconvenience, expense, frustration, and general dehumanization that constitutes modern air travel; it’s called getting behind the wheel and letting ‘er rip. Driving can be well over half the fun of any pleasure trip and, with a little judicious planning, does not have to be much, if any, more time consuming than flying.
When people aren’t treating me right, my response is (usually) not to yell, scream, and complain. My response is to stop doing business with those who so treat me. The entire airline business and flying infrastructure doesn’t treat us right, and didn’t even before the “sequester cuts.” It’s time we cut them off and take to our modern communication devices or, far better, to the open road.
Now, if someone could convince my wife of the wisdom of forever eschewing air travel….
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