In seeking to evaluate the effectiveness of the massive increases in homeland security expenditures since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the common and urgent query has been, “Are we safer?” This, however, is the wrong question. Of course we are “safer”—the posting of a single security guard at one building’s entrance enhances safety, however microscopically. The correct question is, “Are the gains in security worth the funds expended?”The key fact is this: At present rates (and including 9/11 in the count), the likelihood a resident of the United States will perish at the hands of a terrorist is 1 in 3.5 million per year. And the key question, one almost never broached, is this: How much should we be willing to pay to make that likelihood even lower?
We have, in fact, paid—or been willing to pay—a lot. In the years immediately following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 on Washington and New York, it was understandable that there was a tendency to fashion policy and to expend funds in haste and confusion, and maybe even hysteria, on homeland security. After all, intelligence was estimating at the time that there were as many as 5,000 al‑Qaeda operatives at large in the country, and as New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani reflected later, “Anybody, any one of these security experts, including myself, would have told you on September 11, 2001, we’re looking at dozens and dozens and multi-years of attacks like this.”
The intelligence claims and the anxieties of Giuliani and other “security experts” have clearly proved, putting it mildly, to be unjustified. In the frantic interim, however, the U.S. government increased its expenditures for dealing with terrorism massively. At the 10th anniversary of 9/11, federal expenditures on domestic homeland security have increased by some $360 billion over those in place in 2001. Moreover, federal national intelligence expenditures aimed at defeating terrorists at home and abroad have gone up by $110 billion, while state, local, and private sector expenditures have increased by $200 billion more. And the vast majority of this increase, of course, has been driven by much heightened fears of terrorism, not by growing concerns about other hazards.
Tallying all these expenditures and adding in opportunity costs—but leaving out the costs of the terrorism-related (or terrorism-determined) wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and quite a few other items that might be included—the increase in expenditures on domestic homeland security over the decade exceeds $1 trillion.
http://www.slate.com/id/2303167/
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