Roy Blunt: “To continue to handle it as we have, in a crisis moment, is not the right way to do it. To look at the long term, some…”

“To continue to handle it as we have, in a crisis moment, is not the right way to do it. To look at the long term, some tax relief is an option to look at the new obligations that the Federal Government has, in my view, to review our long-term sense of airline security. Until September 11, 2001, there was a widely held and generally defensible view that the fees that passengers paid for airline security were being paid for the purpose of protecting the passengers; and so it was a pure user fee, and it seemed to be defensible in that regard. We now know that we use our security system to secure people who not only are not on the plane that day but who may never be on the plane; and I think the gentleman senses that we need to review that structure to review the additional costs that airlines have assumed because of the new demands of airline security. To look for a more permanent solution to this is absolutely the direction we should take.”