I’ll be the first to say it’s hard to keep up with the policies, projects and planning that go on at the highest levels of our democratic republic.

We’re not privy to this stuff for one thing. For another it’s just so complex and convoluted that we don’t have time to sort stuff out and break it down in terms we understand.

Take the business of balancing the national budget and cutting back on national spending. Really, it’s hard to find fault with that sentiment taken as it is. The devil is in the details regarding what the country will cut back on and who will be impacted by the cuts. That’s why the following jumped off the page at me; see, I can understand this and my guess is you will understand it too.

Allow me to pose it to you in the form of a quiz:

(1) Are you more likely to die from a terrorist attack or risky sexual behavior?

(2) Are you more likely to starve to death or die in a terrorist attack?

(3) Are you more likely to kill yourself or die at the hands of a terrorist?

In all three questions the correct answer is not terrorist or terrorist attack.

When you crunch the numbers the way Washington’s Blog did a couple of years ago you find out you’re 452 times more likely to die from risky sexual behavior than terrorism; 187 times more likely to starve to death than die at the hands of a terrorist; and 2,059 times more likely to kill yourself than be killed by a terrorist.

Here are a few others: 35,079 times more likely to die from heart disease than terrorism; 33,842 times more likely to die from cancer; 4,706 times more likely to drink yourself to death; 353 times more likely to die in a fall; 5,882 times more likely to die from medical error.

As Tom Engelhardt put it, America’s annual fatality risk from terrorism is one in 3.5 million.

Compare that to your chances of dying in a traffic accident during 2015: one in 8,000.

To those of the coupon-clipping, value-hunting, sale-shopping, penny-saved-is-a-penny-earned-mind-set, and slash-the-budget-until-we-all-bleed-philosophy, how about we take some of the trillions we spend annually on terrorism and make roads and automobiles safer?

How about we do something about the suicide epidemic among military veterans … 22 a day!

How about we make American hospitals safer and put billions towards those diseases the Centers for Disease Control say are thousands of times more threatening than a jihadist?

How about crime? Since 9/11 foreign-inspired terrorism has claimed two dozen lives in the U.S. Every year that rolls around there are 100,000 gun homicides in America.

All I’m saying is let’s get some bang for our buck where risk is involved! Call me names if you will but make sure “reasonable” is one of the names you call me. I’m reasonable enough to know that we’ll have to throw our elected leaders a bone or two along the way in order to move trillions of dollars around to give us some real risk-value. It’ll have to be something that speaks to politicians … maybe that risky sexual behavior matter.

Bob Morgan is a retired, award-winning journalist and author.