I know I'm heartless, but I think the fear of bankruptcy would create a much richer and more robust safety solution than the US government is capable of creating with tax revenue. The idea is to allow airlines to decline passengers for any reason they want (can they do that now? I don't know.)
Once this is in place, each airline that suffers a terrorist attack would bear a significant burden to stay in business. People would blame the company for letting the nuts on the plane, rather than the nuts, who can't really be blamed because, well, they're nuts. More importantly, people wouldn't blame whole countries or invent WMDs to justify immoral and wasteful wars against them.
We are suffering from a failure to distinguish. Some airlines operate in a way that makes it slightly more difficult for the nuts to hurt us. We should know which airlines they are, and, depending on how important that kind of safety is to us, their market share will adjust accordingly. The free market is the best mechanism to calculate the portion of air-travel expense that should go toward the thwarting of terrorist attacks (as well as every other calculation of what proportion of expense should go toward what desirable outcome).
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