Welcome to the world 2116, you can fly across town in minutes or across the globe in under an hour. Whole communities are living on mars and solar satellites provide earth with unlimited clean power. In less than a century, boeing took the world from seaplanes to space planes, across the universe and beyond. And if you thought that was amazing, you just wait. Af after september 11th, politicians said government must take over airline security. Get federal Law Enforcement to do this job. Tom daschle said you cant professionalize if you dont fed and and the senate voted 1000 to take over Airport Security sc sir, sir, do you have your i. D. . So is it now professional . Opt out these people dont think so. Fliers complain that they are subjected to such disgusting abuses of power tsa employees ordered the elderly woman remove her soiled adult diaper because it was preventing a former patdown. This former she actually touched my vagi vagina the there havent been successful attacks since september 11th. You might say that shows its w actually, every report shows that tsa missed things. What actually saved us was the passengers and crew. Congressman micah helped create the tsa, the chair of the transportation committee. Richard reed. It wasnt a tsa that saved the day. If you if you look at the diaper bomber, it was the passengers and crew that saved the day. The times square bomber, he called on his cell phone, ordered his ticket on the way to jfk, went through tsa, got on the plane. On top of that, the tsa is such a lousy place to work that more tlan 50 of the work force has quit. The agency keeps losing employees and hiring new ones. Theyre advertising on the top of pizza boxes. A career where xray vision and benefits are standard. Turnover is high not because the tsa is underfunded. It spends ten times what the previous private Screening Companies spent. Micah said he was shocked at how much money they can waste. John, you dont want to know. I just sent two guys down. Theyve got a warehouse in texas and they have hundreds of puffers that didnt work. Remember these . They cost 150,000 each. And were supposed to detect exp but t but they didnt work. They sat in warehouses, and they paid i think 600 apiece for d. O. D. To destroy them. Sot tsa wastes money, misses terrorists, infuriates passengers, and creates long isnt isnt there a better way . Oh, heres one. The lines are shorter at San Francisco airport. They move quickly. And passengers even say the screeners are nice. People here are friendly and willing to help. I think theyre a little more underst eve everybody here is friendly. A lot more friendly than dallas. Dallas and all the other big airports employ government screeners. San fr San Francisco is the one major airport that was allowed to hire screeners who work for a private not not only are these screeners nicer, theyre better at finding the the tsa tested them and found they were twice as good at finding contraband. Why would private skeiners be nicer and better . Heres a reason. They practice. Here theyre racing to match these security carts together under black lights. The fastest screener will win 2,000. Ther theres even dramatic music. The tsa trains its screeners, too, but not like this. In this competition, screeners race to search bags and identify forbidden items. Theres a pipe bomb. Then they rush to repack the all all right, all right in this test, they look at slides of people and try to remember details. How many buttons are on her f four . Yes. The private Company Makes these screeners special. You have to be able to look at something, look at a lot of people and be able to retain what they saw. So this isnt things you find out who is very good at that were really competitive. Screeners love the contests. So usually its, did you go . What whats your score . Im not telling you. If you tell a person your score, theyre going to try to beat you ju you just want to be a winner. Its like bragging rights. I suppose they get better with these contests . Oh, yes. They have to. If you dont have the passion for it, i guess you need to find another job. Who knew privatization would create better attitudes . Privatizing seems so selfish. I bet youre making money. Thats money coming out of my pocket p. I dont mind making a little profit. Its its the capitalistic way, american way. Profit, it makes you try it it makes you do very well. We have to do well. That also means getting passengers through security wait wait times here are shorter because they move screeners th they move staff from piercy check point with two lanes up. If we show red there, were short staff there. We start to back up, we find out how many people we can send to help them. The director of this airport wishes her Screening Company tried as hard to keep lines we we get a high number of visitors in the g of course she does. Her airport is right next to montanas Glacier National park. People go to the park in summertime. Traf traffic triples. But the tsa doesnt respond to screening levels remain constant year round. Same number in the summer as in the winter. So, because of that and the delays it creates, and passenger complaints about rude screeners, cindy wanted to switch to a private Screening Company. The law that created the tsa allows that. But airports have to ask for permission. Cind cindi and other airport managers asked, but the tsa simply didnt respond for a year and a half. Then they said no. What reason did they give you . They didnt give us a reason. We asked tsa officials to come on the show to complain their position, but they decl their their spokesman also lied to us when we asked for permission to film the competitions at San Francisco airport. They told us, the private company is camera shy and wants to stay out of the limelight. But it wasnt true. I dont know why they did i i really dont. After the tsa refused for years to let more airports use private screeners, Congress Finally forced the tsa to allow a few. Montanas Glacier International airport now has them. I bet mcdonalds would like to tell burger king, you cant open here, theres no clear advantage to you coming here. They would love that, im tsa creator congressman mica says the bureaucrats are just protecting their turf. Its typical government. Gives them more power. Yeah. Keep the power in washington. So what were you thinking . You did this theres no question its grown into a monster, and theyve become a huge personnel operation instead of a security operation. Coming up people think the Program Head Start gives poor kids a head [vet] two yearly physicals down. Martha and mildred are good to go. Heres your invoice, ladies. A few stops later, and it looks like big ollie is on the mend. It might not seem that glamorous having an old pickup truck for an office. Or filling your days looking down the south end of a heifer, but. I wouldnt have it any other way. Look at that, i had my best month ever. And earned a shiny new office upgrade. I run on quickbooks. Thats how i own it. There is one Government Program that most everyone says is a big success, and thats head start. Head start has been such an extraordinary success over all these years. Its a program thats w ev everyone loves head start. It gives underprivileged kids some Early Education to give them a head start before regular school. Its l its lobby says its a place where dreams are born and minds are nourished. Talent can grow. Curiosity flourish. Head start is a great p and and it gets results . I think theres tons of eve everyone thinks that, but its not true. Weve spent 180 billion on a program that has zero advantage for disadvantaged kids. What do you mean zero ad th there was a study in 2010 funded by the federal government. It it looked at 114 indicators. It did not find one positive ou so some poor kids got head start. Other other kids didnt. They couldnt tell the difference between the kid that had the large head start investment and the similar poor disadvantaged kid. The governments own study found positive impacts while the kids were in head start, but one year later all gone. By kindergarten and first grade, they could find no difference in the kids that went and kids that didnt. Now, our president has taken a strong stance against ineffective programs. Weve got to will eliminate programs that dont work. Eliminate programs that dont work eliminate proom programs that no longer work. Weve spent more than 100 billion and the government does this big study and finds, oops, no difference. Right. So they say, okay, were going to stop . No. Instead it gets a billiondollar increase and then the next year it gets a 400 milliondollar i i h i had a chance to visit one of the classrooms here, and i have to say it got me a little choked up. We should be choked up because government keeps spending more money on programs that even they admit dont work. I wanted toz r confront the administration, people from head start about this, but they wouldnt talk to me. So im glad congressman al ellison did. You cannot tell me that the food that they get, the instruction that they get, the love that they get from the people who work there are not doing these kids tremendous be i w i would like to believe that they get a lasting benefit, but the governments own data finds none of that. Well, you know what . Thats not the problem of head start. Thats thats the problem of not adequate investment in our Public Education system. What would be enough . 50,000 a kid, 100,000 a kid . The line is always, we have to spend more money. And if were just better funded, well eventually get Better Outcomes for kids. Thats what the big spenders always say about most everything government does. Yes, we can more money and government power will fix everything. But no, they cant. Okay, although government cant, when we return, well see how i built my business with passion. But i keep it growing by making every dollar count. Thats why i have the spark cash card from capital one. I earn unlimited 2 cash back on everything i buy for my studio. And that unlimited 2 cash back from spark means thousands of dollars each year going back into my business. Thats huge for my bottom line. Whats in your wallet . My lineage was the vecchios and zuccolis. Through ancestry, through dna i found out that i was only 16 italian. He was 34 eastern european. So i went onto ancestry, soon learned that one of our ancestors we thought was italian was eastern european. This is my ancestor who i didnt know about. He looks a little bit like me, yes. Ancestry has many paths to discovering your story. Get started for free at ancestry. Com yes, we can. Yes, we can. Yes, we can. No, they cant. Thats a nasty title for my new book, but politicians cant do what private individuals can. Over the years, politicians have promised us energy independence, world peace, an end to poverty. If we just give them more money, they will solve those problems. But, no, they cant. Their plans go bad. Head start doesnt work. College tuition pays for spas. The tsa is awful. She actually felt my touched my vagina. There are hundreds of other examples of how government cant in here. You can read more of that on my website john stossel. Com. But wait, you say, if government cant, what about cuttingedge science like nasa . America did send a man to the wev weve got the flag up now. We all like this. Beautiful. Just beautiful. But think about it. It cost billions. And what did we get . Promos for a breakfast drink. Tang instant breakfast drink went with them. Nasa technology brought us the cat scan, but our billions havent gotten us much. We get lats of delayed projects. Government science is clumsy. For a fraction of the cost, a private group called the x prize does better. Offer a prize, and they will they they promised 10 million to anyone who could launch three men into outer space. 25 teams competed for the prize. I have never been myself as creative as i have eyeballing this [ bleep ] prize. Burt ruetans spaceship one won the prize. Billionaire investors said, i want a piece of that. Richard branson came in and bought the rights and commercialized it. A company that plans to run a tour bus in space. Already, tom hainkz, ashton kutcher, katy perry and brangelina bought tickets. The fare is 200,000 now, but branson says someday it will be as cheap as normal airfare. This is richard branson, and hes here. Im told private Companies Wont want to do this. Theres no money to be made in going to the moon so this has to be done by government. You know, all innovation really comes out of the private it com it comes out of entrepreneurs. How are they going to make by by charging for the ride. Politicians say Government Support is critical in helping businesses get new understand ideas off the we were programmed to believe that, if its for real hightech, feweristic innovation, its got to come from the government. And its just the opposite. The feds have already thrown billions at failures like solyndra, and that was tiny compared to the clinch river breeder reactor, solar one, the triad ethanol plant and the hundreds of billions wasted on sin fuel. Some things work out, some so some say boondoggles are worth the risk. I like the idea of government taking my tax dollars and investing in the tech follows of tomo progressives also like government forcing private companies to do it. Fuel efficiency stbdzs have forced detroit to innovate in ways it might not have without them. If if government didnt dictate 35 miles per gallon we wouldnt get there . We need government to force i i think we do need government to force it. But no, we dont. While government spents billions, x prize offered a 10 million prize for a car that gets 100 miles per gallon. The announcement parks an immediate and powerful worldwide res we were in. Weve got to do this. Were going to go for this in a big way. To meet the challenge, some teams use gasoline, electricity, even compressed air. 130 teams around the world e its its proving whats possible. The design phase was first. Car hz to pass a looks test. Then came the safety and performance tests. Most teams were eliminated. Oh, well. We had the range. We had the mileage. But zero to 60, our transmission just didnt hold up. This team won the prize with a car that got 102 miles per i cant buy these cars. Not yet. But these cars are slowly going to production, components of them are going into the large auto manufacturers. One more example. Thousands of gallons of crude oil are oozing. Government took charge after the bp oil spill. Make no mistake, well continue to do whatever is ne have we brought in the best and the brightest of all the minds that could deal with this . No. Government hadnt. We start looking at this and said, you know, reinventing how to clean up oil on the surface hasnt changed since the exxon valdez 21 years aerearlier. How would you improve it . I dont know. But the competition will bring the best ideas to the top. Its odd to hear you say i dont know. The government assumption is that someone in government does know and can pick. But youre giving away all this money, and you say i dont we we dont pick the winner in advance like the government does in research. The Research Funding agency says, youre a good researcher, heres money. We flip it and say, i dont know which of you hundred teams are the best one, but the one who achieves this, well pay you. We only pay for success. And im waiting for that great big check. So Wendy Schmidt offered a 1. 5 million prize for a faster way to clean up oil. 350 teams around the world registered to enter the comp we we gave it our best shot. Well see what hatches. Some teams had no Prior Experience with oil spills. We get asked all the time, how long have you been in the oil industry . Well, counting today . The top ten teams went headtohead at the Worlds LargestOil Spill Cleanup facility in new jersey, and seven of the ten teams doubled the preexisting standards that had been used to clean up oil for the last 20 years. If we get this pump working, we will win. One of the teams that doubled it was a team that met in a las vegas tattoo parlor. I kid you not. You cant make up this stuff. And they built a scale model in one of the guys pools and it still doubled the ability to clean up oil spills from the last 21 years. So for 20 years they tried and tried, and they can clean up oil spills but only at a certain with with a prize, you double it. Actually, the winning team for the prize quadrupled it. Why cant the Environmental Protection agency lead stuff like this . Well, they could, but they didnt, didnt they . No, they cant just because government cant, that doesnt mean we cant. We we can indivi individuals succeed while government fails. Thats our show. Im john stossel. Thanks for watching. Join us monday. Have a good weekend. Good night from new york. Colonel sanders failed until he was 65 years old. John. John Charlie Brown ever learn from his failures. But we can learn from failure. Try and try again. Thats our s