FAA: Formerly The Federal Aviation Adminstration, Now: Forgetful About Airplanes

According to the government's budget website, the Federal Aviation Administration, the FAA, for the fiscal year of 2011, the FAA wants a $9.8 billion budget to "be used to promote aviation safety and efficiency." However, according to an Associated Press article from December 12, 2010, there is really nothing efficient or safe about one aspect of the FAA operations. Details from the article include the following information:

• The FAA's aircraft registry is missing key information on about 119,000 airplanes in the United States, about a third of all planes in this country.
• These 119,000 planes have questionable registration characteristics including missing forms, invalid addresses, unreported sales, and other paper work problems.
• The concern is these gaping holes in the government's knowledge could make it easier for terrorists and criminals to obtain and use planes in terrorist and criminal activities.
• This paper work disaster would also make it harder for plane owners to get important safety recall information.
• The article documents cases ranging from Venezuela to California to the state of Washington where criminal activity used false registration information to carry out their crimes while forcing innocent American plane owners to prove that it was not their planes involved in the crimes.
• The FAA has known about the problem for years but only recently decided to try and fix the problem.

And how are they going to fix this problem that they created through their incompetence? Apparently, the FAA records are so bad that they are going to start over from scratch. They are putting the burden on American plane owners by cancelling all of their registration certificates and forcing all American plane owners to go through a new registration process. That is how badly they have managed this relatively straight forward responsibility, it is so screwed up that it cannot be fixed and must be junked outright.

But the fallacy in this approach is obvious. How many of the criminal and terrorists, who have access to those 119,000 missing planes, are going to actually going to re-register their criminal activity planes? Does the FAA really think that a criminal or terrorist is going to walk into an FAA facility to register their plane just because the FAA said that all plane owners need to re-register? As a result of not understanding human nature, the government and political class will again force law abiding Americans to jump through hoops to prove their innocence and non-criminal behavior while the criminals just go about their business as if nothing happened.

If the government and the politicians running that government had an occasional screw up on minor matters, it would be no big deal. But the failures, poor priorities, bad bookkeeping, wasteful spending, and other travesties just keep on coming. Consider some examples of those we have recently lived through:

• Over two dozen Securities and Exchange employees are shown to be using most of their working hours downloading pornography on their government computers while the United States financial system almost implodes. Several of these porn-obsessed employees were in the SEC upper management ranks.
• An oil rig explodes in the Gulf Of Mexico creating the country's biggest environmental disaster but the government and its politician handlers have no clue how to fix the leak which goes on for months. Investigations show that some Federal employees responsible for oil rig safety were also porn addicts and were not doing the required safety checks of the rigs.
• The Department of Defense and the State Department are so inept at data security that highly classified information is easily obtained by an ordinary Army private, using minimal computer equipment, and the Wikileaks website to embarrass the U.S. government and possibly endanger people around the world who are helping in the war on terrorism.
• The political class wastes billions of dollars on an economic stimulus program that fails miserably by wasting taxpayer on such projects as cataloging and photographing insects on an island off the coast of Africa and fixing thousands of bridges in this country that do not need to be fixed (as reported by an Associated Press investigation in late 2009).
• A House of Representatives Congresswoman and a Senator are proud to pass their legislation that would allow the Federal government to regulate the sound of television commercials while the less important problems of high unemployment, failing public schools, skyrocketing national debt, the lack of a national energy policy and strategy, and two wars are never adequately addressed.
• Multiple Congressional members get involved in a debate about how to structure a college football playoff format while these above issues go unresolved.
• While these same issues are not addressed, our President of two years wastes some recent time appearing on the TV show "Myth Busters" which is not to be confused with the time he wasted to film a TV advertisement for the George Lopez Show which is not to be confused with the time he wasted on the Daily Show. Seems like television is major infatuation with Washington.

The list goes on and on but gets too depressing to think of all the snafus we have to live with via our politicians. These snafus not only was taxpayer money but in the case of the FAA registration fiasco and the Wikileaks scandal, could endanger people's lives.

That is why Step 34 from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" is so important to get implemented. Step 34 proposes a process that would remove Congressional committee and subcommittee members from their committee posts for screw-ups like the this FAA situation. In this example, those politicians sitting on committees with FAA oversight responsibility would be removed from those seats for 1) allowing such a problem to occur in the first place, 2) allowing the problem to fester for years, and 3) not coming up with a viable solution since the proposed solution, making every American plane owner to re-register their planes, will have no impact on many of those 119,000 missing planes that are being used by criminals and terrorists.

Until there is accountability by our political class for their vast wasteful and dangerous mismanagement, we will continue to have situations above,  where the FAA can easily and truthfully be renamed to the less than flattering, Forgetful About Airplanes. Such a designation is especially embarrassing when your sole job is accountability for the domestic aviation industry.



Our recent book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at www.loathemygovernment.com. It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.



Please visit the following sites for freedom:


http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/
http://www.reason.com/