“A Threat to American Lives”
Nobody wants to encourage avoidable American deaths. There is no constituency that wants that. And because preventing threats to life is universally agreed to be wise, it provides cover for a huge opportunity to fleece taxpayers.
US President Eisenhower saw the potential for this deception and warned us in his 1961 Farewell Address. With the vast insight that a five star combat general and a US president would have, Eisenhower said:
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” [Emphasis mine.]
I would add that the potential for the disastrous rise of capital misallocation exists and will persist.
Here’s What I Mean By “ Capital Misallocation”
In 2018, The Stimson Study Group on Counterterrorism Spending gathered a nonpartisan group to provide an initial tally of total US counterterrorism spending over roughly sixteen years from September 11, 2001 through 2017.
The total came to $2.83 trillion. That’s about $177 billion per year.
OK, fine, what do we get for $2.8 trillion?
Well, according to the University of Maryland’s National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), over the 20 year period from 1995 to 2014, which obviously includes the 9/11 attacks, the worldwide US fatalities from terrorism total 3,503 Americans.
Got that? In twenty years there were 3,503 American deaths worldwide from terrorism. That’s 175 people per year - and 83% of those were from one day on 9/11.
Comparative Analysis of Deaths
So the US has a problem (terrorism) that’s causing 175 deaths per year. And it’s addressing that problem by spending $177 billion per year. That’s a billion dollars per death.
Now let’s look at some other things that kill innocent Americans.
According to the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, these are the top causes of American deaths every year.
Leaving COVID aside as an anomaly, below is a chart of the annual deaths in the US (as reported by the CDC) and the equivalent deaths over a 20 year period.
So now we can see that over a twenty year period, common diseases kill 43.2 million Americans and terrorism kills 3,500 Americans in the same period.
We can visualize this as common diseases, over 20 years, taking the lives of absolutely everyone living in the states of California and Oregon, and terrorism taking the lives of the people living in the small town of Ketchum, Idaho.
Thanks to what I would characterize as feverish propaganda overstating the “threat to American lives” from terrorism, the taxpayer shells out $177 billion per year to save the number of folks in tiny but beautiful Ketchum, Idaho.
If the same value was assigned to the 2.2 million annual deaths from common diseases, in order to equalize spending, it would require $2.2 quadrillion. That’s about 22 times the entire annual global economy. That’s how disproportionately politicians consider the threat to ‘threat to American lives’ from global terrorism.
The Quibbles
We know disease is always going to kill a lot of people and most of them are older. The majority of these millions of annual lives can’t be saved for any amount of money. Yet.
Whereas, preventing a death from terrorism is plausible. The folks who died on 9/11 were in no danger of imminent death from natural causes on that day. If that attack had been thwarted none of them would have died.
And the government employees and civilian contractors who benefit from the trillions of dollars in counterterrorism spending would insist that without their efforts many more people would be victims of terrorists. Logically, that assertion can’t be proved or disproved. But we do know that prior to 9/11 the US spent a tiny fraction of this money on counterterrorism and there were still very few terror related deaths, just as there is now. So giant budgets or not, there just aren’t very many US deaths from terrorism and there never has been.
A professional statistician would say I have some mixing of apples and oranges here and need to be careful drawing absolute conclusions. And that’s a valid point.
Seeing the Obvious
But there is a common sense sniff-test here that should be obvious to any open minded observer. The US taxpayer is forced to spend $177 billion annually to try to reduce a twenty year average of 175 terrorism-related deaths per year. That’s a billion dollars a pop.
Can you imagine spending a billion dollars to prevent one cancer death? One drug overdose death? One fatal car accident?
How about spending a thousand million dollars to prevent a single fatal fall from a ladder?
Is that a wise way to spend your tax money?
What Do CNN and FOX News Say?
Watch the parade of talking heads on the news from Retired General So-and-So to Former National Security Such-and-Such, and they all stoke the fear of terrorism and insist that more needs to be done because of the constant and ever-growing ‘threat to American lives.’
What never gets fully disclosed is how many of those talking heads work as employees, consultants, and board members to Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics or some other major beneficiary of the billions and trillions of dollars squeezed out of ordinary taxpayers.
Imagine if you were the CEO of a public company that made land mines, artillery or guided missiles. Your shareholders are looking for growth every year. If your company grossed X-dollars of revenue this year, you better have a solid plan to sell X plus 5% next year. Wall Street isn’t interested in declining revenues and shrinking profits.
As a CEO you need marketing people out there generating more demand for your missiles. So you grab those retiring generals, admirals and former high level civil servants from the intelligence services and you pay them a small fortune to get on the news and talk about the massive risk to all Americans if more taxpayer money isn’t spent on the stuff your company sells.
And that is exactly what Eisenhower was warning everyone about in 1961: “The disastrous rise of misplaced power.” And along with it, the disastrous rise of poorly allocated capital. Like one billion dollars to prevent one death from terrorism.
And good luck voting Blue Team or Red Team to bring a halt to all of this. They are both in on the grift and they both raise campaign money from it and garner millions of votes from unionized workers, enlisted military, and defense sector investors who all want to see bigger budgets coming their way.
The politicians don’t care enough about the millions of Americans who don’t get any benefit from that wasted money, or who have to tighten their family budget to pay their ever-increasing tax bill. The politician’s military-industrial insider pals get your tax money because those are the who your representatives golf with.
The Takeaway
Americans are relentlessly propagandized about how more should be done to counter the “threat to American lives” from global terrorism. That threat is minuscule compared to what really kills innocent Americans every single day, and trillions of dollars are being squandered by politicians instead of being intelligently invested by smarter people who could save millions of lives combating common disease and extending the life expectancy of everyone.
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