[digitallis42]

If it was free, I would be more accepting of this answer. Since you have to pay it is just extortion and it incentivizes poor service in the gen pop TSA lanes. Generally you want to avoid incentivizing a public service to be shitty.

[xp84]

So you'd rather that the taxes everyone pays, including the poor, goes to pay the costs of doing the background checks on the business travelers and other upper-class people who fly frequently? There is a cost to administer the program, and the program is useful in that adding a fast lane speeds up the lines for everyone, as the fast lane inherently has more capacity per hour. And it also means fewer people to be screened by the primary lanes, which means more attention can be put toward a group statistically more likely to contain a bad actor (because they have had no background checks).

The fee is tiny compared to the costs of a plane ticket. It's $100 for multiple years of validity.

[jacobgkau]

> So you'd rather that the taxes everyone pays, including the poor, goes to pay the costs of doing the background checks on the business travelers and other upper-class people who fly frequently? There is a cost to administer the program,

The cost to do security checks on people scales with the number of people. There are plenty of taxes and fees already included with plane tickets; whatever "security fee" is actually necessary to fund reasonable security can be tacked onto the cost of tickets that way, and will automatically charge more from people flying more often (and won't penalize people who don't fly at all).

The only possible economic benefits separating it out into an optional multi-year subscription service provides for any party are 1) overcharging people who misgauge actually "needing" it when they don't end up flying enough to meet whatever your threshold for judging that is, and 2) actually not fully charging super-frequent fliers for the amount of workload they put on the system.

[TheBicPen]

Why shouldn't it be free for frequent travelers then? If it has all these benefits, including lower overall cost, surely it makes sense to not disincentive its use by charging for it.

[scarface_74]

If you are a frequent traveler, you probably have one of the many credit cards that reimburse you.

But who is going to keep up with the “frequent travelers”?

[vel0city]

How much cost is avoided by having far fewer people in the lines for deeper searches by even more TSA agents every flight?

[kevin_thibedeau]

We're supposed to be a country of equals. Not one where the well-heeled can buy better public service.

[scarface_74]

Flying is not a public service. There has never been anything equal about flying.

[kevin_thibedeau]

If the government is offering special access privileges, it is. Next up, reading exams for voter registration to boost literacy.

[scarface_74]

I also had to pay a fee to the government for my driver’s license to have access to drive and passport to leave the country. Should those also be free?