This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, July 10th, 2017. I'm Caleb Brown. How we spend money on security needs to reckon with the fact that if lives saved for the money is the relevant metric, there are simply better ways to

spend money that now get spent on fighting or preventing terrorism.

Trevor Thrall, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute is co-author of the new study Step Back, Lessons for U.S.

foreign Policy from the failed war on terror.

We spoke last week.

If somebody were concerned about saving lives in the United States, you would have to look at diseases,

essentially diseases of choice that many Americans have terrorism is something that ought to be way, way, way down the list.

Heart disease, getting hit by a car, smoking, all these sorts of things are much, much greater

risks than terrorism.

All right, so what is the conclusion that we draw from that fact combined with our trillions of dollars in spending on a broad

global war on terror.

What do we to take away from that?

I think there are two things we can take away from it.

First of all, just on a simple cost benefit, you know, from a cost benefit perspective,

the United States could have spent the $5 trillion it has committed so far to the

war on terror in almost any other fashion and saved vastly more American lives than even the best estimate of the war on terror has produced.

But the second is that if we look carefully at how the United States spent that $5 trillion, most of it in a global war on terror

overseas, we would learn that the United States has made things worse, not just for the United States has made things worse,

not just for the United States,

but for many other people.

And terrorism is now 15, 16 years after 9-11,

a bigger problem worldwide than it was before.

...