Saturday 2 April 2016

An Inordinate Fear of Terrorism? - WSJ

A few posts back I wrote about Obama's ridiculous moral equivalence: when he said that more Americans were killed in bathtubs than by terrorism. Perhaps so (in this year at least), but if left alone there will be ever more terrorist attacks while bathtub accidents are going to stay pretty much the same. Also we don't have to spend billions thwarting bathtub accidents as we do for terrorism. 
Yet another case of Obama's puzzling blindness. (Another being his claim to be "proud" of not enforcing the red line against Syria. Proud!?)
This WSJ Leader makes the point rather well. 
/Snip
"In 2014 the total number of deaths from terrorism increased by 80% when compared to the prior year," reports the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) in its widely cited Global Terrorism Index. In absolute terms, that comes to 32,685 deaths from terrorism, up from 3,329 at the turn of the century. The economic cost, the IEP adds, is somewhere north of $52 billion, plus another $114 billion that various countries budget for counterterrorism efforts. Last we checked, nobody was spending that kind of money on bathtub safety.