Dollars and Cents and 9/11

In 2001 37,862 people died in car accidents in the United States. In 2001 16,037 people were murdered. In 2001 30,622 people committed suicide. In 2001 millions of people died from heart disease, cancer, kidney disease, liver disease and so on. In 2001 2,996 people died in the 9/11 attacks.

As a result of those attacks we have spent about a trillion dollars on increased "homeland security" either directly on government expenditures, or indirectly on increased costs to business and the public for airport security and other measures. We have spent a trillion dollars on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and will likely spend trillions more "stabilizing" post-war Iraq and Afghanistan, and caring for the veterans wounded in those wars. More than 6,000 American soldiers have died in Iraq and Afghanistan, and more than 50,000 have been seriously wounded, many maimed for life.

Has the money, blood and tears we spent in the ten years since 9/11 yielded benefits in national security and lives saved commensurate with the costs? Slate has been running a series of articles about this, and the answer seems to be a definite "no." To justify the amount of money we're spending on security we'd have to prevent 1,667 Times Square-style attacks every year.

Certainly, some of the security measures taken since 9/11 have made us safer. But does anyone seriously believe taking our shoes off before getting on an airplane makes us safer? The shoe bomber failed. The underwear bomber failed, so why are 6 oz. cans of shaving cream forbidden on planes? Flight 93 showed why we don't need sky marshals -- after 9/11 we're all sky marshals.

There's been a lot of talk about the existential threat of radical Islamic terrorism. But the reality is that Al Qaeda cannot mount any kind of serious threat to the existence of the United States. Even if in the worst case they managed to obtain and detonate a nuclear device. Yes, they can hurt people, thousands of people, but they can never destroy this country. There aren't enough of them and we're too big and too strong. To put it in easily understood terms, anyone who really thinks Al Qaeda could possibly threaten our very existence is a coward and a wimp and hates America.

Yes, we need to take security measures. But we just can't afford to buy every expensive X-ray machine that's being hawked at the government. Even though the risk of cancer from those machines is very low, the increased cancer rate in the employees who run them will probably be greater than the number of deaths from terrorist acts prevented.

We accept all kinds of risks on a daily basis without a second thought. In mere seconds the Fort Hood shooter and Jared Loughner killed and wounded dozens of people with guns almost anyone can buy almost anywhere. But having guns everywhere is a risk we're willing to accept. Ten times more people die in car accidents every year than died in 9/11, but people still think nothing of speeding 10 or 20 miles over the limit, we still allow people to drink and drive, we still give 16-year-olds licenses, and many jurisdictions still have speed limits that far exceed the average person's ability reaction time, especially considering how many of us talk on cell phones while driving.

The chance of the average American dying from a radical Islamic terrorist attack is 0.000000285 per year (1 in 3.5 million), or essentially zero. And people who live in rural Alabama or Iowa or Arizona or really anywhere but large cities have, for all practical purposes, zero chance of being killed by Islamic terrorists.

Why are we so willing to spend trillions of dollars to prevent the potential loss of a few thousand lives to terrorism, but dead set against spending that same amount on a single-payer health care plan for the entire country? A plan that would have saved literally millions of actual American lives over the last 10 years? The money we're spending on security and the wars and their aftermath would do more to wipe out the debt problem than the work product of the debt supercommittee. Even modest increases in

The truth is, it's not about saving lives. It's about revenge. We will go to any lengths to frustrate Al Qaeda's plans, because we want to deny them the satisfaction of beating us. There's no easily identified villain involved in car accidents, or suicide, or heart disease, or cancer. Even though we know exactly what causes them -- alcohol and drug consumption, distracted and speeding drivers, poor diet -- we are still totally complacent about them even though they will cause us far more harm than Al Qaeda ever could.