How the rich get richer

"It finally voted 96 to 1 to adopt a $31.9 billion spending plan for Homeland Security in the 2006 fiscal year that appropriates $100 million for transit security, which is $50 million less than in this year's budget."
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"Over the last four years, Homeland Security has allotted $250 million to transit security grants, compared with about $15 billion for aviation security."
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"The truth of the matter is, a fully loaded airplane with jet fuel, a commercial airliner, has the capacity to kill 3,000 people," Mr. Chertoff said in an interview Thursday with The Associated Press. "A bomb in a subway car may kill 30 people. When you start to think about your priorities, you're going to think about making sure you don't have a catastrophic thing first. But it doesn't mean that we only focus on aviation. We do aviation, we do other things as well, but we scale our response based on the nature of the architecture."

But that's where the problem with the argument lies. If you want to chose to confront the problem from a proportional standpoint, then you can't also go about dividing up the money evenly to each and every state. If you're going to say you need to protect the greatest catastrophe from happening, then you can't spend more on security per person in North Dakota than you do in New York City. Anything other really amounts to nothing more than pork barreling.