Between September 11, 2001 and December 31, 2016, 3,222 Americans died in terrorist attacks. This includes the attackers themselves and excludes deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq.
3,081 of these deaths happened on American soil.
2,902 of these deaths happened on September 11, 2001.
That's 214 deaths per year on average.
How Much Did We Spend Per Death?
By August 2016, the US had spent $3.6 trillion on the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria, plus Homeland Security.
This works out to $1,117,318,435.75 per victim of terrorism.
That's 1.1 billion dollars. Per person. I checked the math.
To put this in perspective: You could have given each victim's family $10 million and still had $3.5 trillion left over to spend on literally anything else. Universal healthcare, perhaps. Or 40 million college scholarships. Or just small pieces of paper with dead presidents on them, distributed randomly to citizens while explaining that this is somehow cheaper than what you actually did.
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