[cowtown]

Superman, the error in your "prioritization" argument (and please notice that I didn't get an oh-so-subtle jab at your President and my President in there), in the language of statistics, is that you are comparing two non-normal random samples.

Take any cause of death from your original list: Say "2) Heart disease deaths." We know that X number of people died from heart disease in 2001, X+Y in 2002, etc. We can create a graph of deaths over time, do a linear curve fit, and have an extremely good idea of how many people will die of heart disease in 2010.

No try that with terrorism. How many will die between now and 2010 due to Islamic radicals? Could be 1,000. Bring nuclear capabilities in, and it could be 10 million. We're not fighting a disease here. We're fighting uncertainty. And that's expensive and, well, uncertain.

You can't run a linear curve fit on expected terrorism, then line up the graph side-by-side with heart disease deaths. But you can logically say that spending money to fight it should decrease the number of deaths caused.

So the real question boils down to one of philosophy. Do you believe that there is the potential for massive death due to terrorism? If yes, then go to step 2 - how much money do you allocate to fight it?

You seem to argue that each of your five causes of death may be more destructive than terrorism. Maybe you're right, this year, or next year, or the year after that. But don't bet on being right for long.