Death Comes to All of Us

The question that John Mueller and Mark Stewart raise in Foreign Affairs is whether the money we spend on counter-terrorism is a wise investment. Mueller has been questioning these expenditures - which total $1 trillion since 9/11 without counting Iraq and Afghanistan - for quite a while and will soon be publishing a book on the subject.

We should worry more about dying in an accident than at the hands of a terrorist as death by accident is almost a thousand times more likely than death by terrorism. Here's a chart comparing risks of fatalities.

You can see that the only serious terrorism risks are in Northern Ireland and Israel; this should not come as a surprise. Whereas the risk in this country is 1 in 3,500,000. We'd have to have a 9/11 catastrophe every year to bring the risk down to 1 in 100,000. The amount of money we are spending on counter-terrorism is not well spent, although it makes the politicians think they are doing something for the country.

What else could we have spent $1 trillion on in the past nine years?