Sure, I think we can both agree that its a tradeoff that should be discussed, but lets not minimize how complex the analysis is. Money spent on preventing terrorist attacks can can have many-order effects (i.e. invention of multi-use technology), as can money spent on stopping preventable deaths. As a logical person I'll of course agree to spending money in the most effective place; our disagreement will be in how to do the cost-benefit analysis. For example, you mention preventable deaths as a good place to spend money, but the devil is in the details. Smoking, being overweight, and alcohol are the leading causes of preventable deaths in the United States and the government has been waging a campaign against these in some form or another for decades. In the case of alcohol we're actually coming up on a century. It's not a given that spending more money on the problem will actually help and if that's your position you should justify it.

My reason for entering the debate is I think people generally don't think about the true cost of a successful terrorist attack. For example, a successful attack on a nuclear power plant would cost $700 billion. Even if people were thinking about costs accurately, I recognize even then there will be disagreement and I'm happy to have that debate about whether anti-terror or anti-smoking is the right place to spent money. I'm just pushing for people to think more accurately about costs because the usual level of discourse is how cars kill more people than terrorists and thats just not the whole story.