Your TSA Security Fees Just Doubled, But Security Won’t Improve

As if flying weren’t costly enough, your
next plane ticket is going to be more expensive, thanks to the
federal government. Today the Transportation Security
Administration’s (TSA) security fee rose by more than double.

CNN reports:

Until Monday, a passenger was charged $2.50 for each leg of a
journey. For a nonstop round trip, the cost
was $5. For a round trip with a connection each way, the cost was
$10.

The fee was capped at two flights each way. That means you
couldn’t get charged more than $5 each way or $10 round trip, even
if you took three flights to get your destination.

Now, passengers must pay a flat fee of $5.60 in each direction,
no matter how many plane transfers are made to get from one city to
another.

For passengers flying a nonstop round trip, that means the fee
will increase from $5 to $11.20.

Passengers flying round-trip with a connection each way will see
their fees increase $1.20 to $11.20 per round trip, versus $10
before the fee increase.

Domestic flyers will also get hit with an additional $5.60 if
you have a layover that’s four hours or longer.

“Business travelers who fly non-stop routes, and travelers in
secondary markets requiring connections,”
suggests Fox News, “will see the biggest impact.”

“Due to new TSA fee hike, travelers will pay a
billion dollars more per year in added taxes/fees,” tweeted Nick Calio, the
president and CEO of Airlines for America, an industry advocacy
group.

The securirty agency, which operates with an annual budget of
over $7 billion, gets a lot of flak.
More than half of Americans believe all those pat-downs and
invasive body scans are mere security theater that have no real
deterrent on hijackings.  And those skeptics are right.
Research on the 13-year-old agency shows it so far
hasn’t had a measurable effect on air travel safety.  

The “TSA estimates the hike will generate $16.9 billion more
than current collections,”
explains USA Today. The heftier fee won’t actually do
much (if anything) to improve security, though. “Congress agreed to
the increase in December to raise $12.6 billion to cut the
deficit,” and nothing will go to security improvement until that’s
paid. 

Airlines for America
criticizes that the government treating “airlines and their
passengers as its own personal ATM,” though some members of
Congress say they never intended for the TSA to charge this much.
Senate Budget Committee chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.) has
contested that the TSA changed how defines a “round trip”
flight in order to work around the cap Congress placed on the
agency’s fees.