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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

Over a trillion dollars over 28 years. There are about 250 million U.S. taxpayers. That's $150 out of the pocket of every single taxpayer, every year, just to cover the cost of this one monumentally embarrassing failure. If you're a U.S. citizen born after 1974, you've been setting fire to this money annually for your entire adult life. No value has been provided other than as a government subsidy to military contractors, and if the whole point is just to transfer wealth to military contractors then we might as well just call it a subsidy and have them sit on their hands rather than continually embarrass us with their empirical incompetence. It's hard not to seethe with rage at the thought of all the better things that this money could have been spent on. I look forward to wasting my tax dollars on this boondoggle for the rest of my life.

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Sure, some of the money has gone to a small number of rich people, but there's quite a large number of working class people designing and assembling these planes. To say that the money has been set on fire or that no value has been provided seems a bit harsh, much of the money is employing a large number of skilled people in the USA and in other countries. And it's not just the USA taxpayers who are paying for this, these planes are sold to a few different customer countries.

All of those skilled workers could have been building something useful, however. The waste of their time and skill is indeed burning resources, in an even more concrete sense than setting money on fire.

But then they would have time to be politically active enough to demand better living conditions and social safety.

They could be, but if the program didn't exist, our economic system would not have allocated their labour to productive ends.

That's a fairly conclusive statement with no objective basis. Care to elaborate?

We have millions of unemployed people, and much work that needs to be done (Teaching, childcare, elderly care, infrastructure maintenance, construction, etc.)

Why aren't they doing it? Could it be because we don't optimize for 'overall value created'?

How do you know that? If the economy had an extra trillion dollars to allocate, there would be a massive number of alternative activities these workers would have had available.

Either the tax money would have been collected anyway, and spent somewhere. Or the tax money would not have been collected and it would have been "naturally" allocated by the population.

Well in the worst case, we can just have the gov't allocate it like they did here. Just have it go to building infrastructure or something. Repair our old bridges and roadways. Or maybe fund some schools. Or at least put build something cool and shiny for scientific research? Like fusion or space travel or particle accelerators.

> those skilled workers could have been building something useful

I wouldn't say the F-35 is useless. It contains a breathtaking integration of advanced technologies. There are benefits to that R&D. It's also an incredibly capable platform–the principle complaint is it's too capable, that we could have gotten more bang for our bucks with more less-capable planes.

> I wouldn't say the F-35 is useless.

You're right. After 28 years and $1 trillion it FINALLY delivered a single bomb in Afghanistan two weeks ago.

Not totally useless.

Made all the more impressive by the fact that the Smithsonian Museum could very well deliver a bomb in Afghanistan, if only they would dust off a P-51 Mustang, or, say, the Wright Flyer. The Taliban (or whatever today's antagonist is that we're using to excuse this pointless war) aren't exactly known for their extensive^W existent air force.

If it were pitched as R&D then sure, that's fine.

You’re not wrong but the entire point here is efficiency. I have no doubt that allocated with the right teams we could inovate more with 500 million dollars. Or .5% of this project’s cost.

If the cost is 1T, it's 0.05%.

In some ways, the point of war is to burn resources for no reason. Solving the crisis of overproduction. So if we can do it with less war, maybe that's a step in the right direction.

> the crisis of overproduction

If something is overproduced, it accumulates and/or falls in price. There is no "crisis of overproduction," though there may be a "crisis of underinvestment in research" and "crisis of underemployment," both problems the American military budget addresses.

Does any of that R&D get shared publicly or is it one of those things where the talent that designed it eventually goes on to different companies and the research spreads that way?

> There are benefits to that R&D.

For Lockheed Martin. Are they obligated to publish their R&D findings for the Pentagon or anyone else?

A well-known German comedian has lines in his performance that are along the lines of "Doesn't anyone think of the jobs in the dynamite stick industry?" (in relation to suicide bomber prevention, which at the time was more of a topic than right now) as a response to German government worries that higher environmental standards for cars could cause job loss in the German car industry.

Or another point of view: You think those people can either build overpriced planes or nothing at all (paying them to do community service or work on open source projects might even be preferable)?

The US (and all countries) actually do have quite a large sector of state-planned economy. Discussions about whether a country really needs to have a military more capable than the next ten (or whatever number it currently is) countries combined aside, the actual main purpose from the point of view of most politicians is to be able to have government handouts for their constituents, military results are secondary because given the huge amount of resources spent overall they'll win anyway. But instead of calling for everything to be a "free market" (whatever that means), maybe admitting that maybe a large state sector is useful might help find other places to spend such huge sums. Right now the by far most convenient way is the emotions-laden "defense". Part of the problem is that we give politicians no other choice to use money, military is the only sector where they can get away with it. Oh yes, social spending, but that does not lead to production or research or at least not nearly on a similar enough scale, besides, it is much more under attack than military spending.

What if those skilled workers' productivity had been applied toward something that people actually wanted? Even if 900 billion of that went back into the economy, then those skilled laborers have been spending this time outputting far less than their value.

Well, I actually wanted the F-22, but for some reason I doubt that is what you meant. About 5000 should do, which is nothing compared to what we built under difficult wartime conditions in World War II.

I also wanted redundant protection from incoming enemy ICBMs.

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.

It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.

It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.

It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.

We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.

We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.

This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."

--President Dwight Eisenhower

Thank you for sharing this beautiful quote.

No problem. I've always found it fascinating that a military general turned President warned us so strongly against the dangers of the military-industrial complex.

I think Eisenhower gets too much credit here. If anyone was ever well-placed to prevent the rise of MIC, it was a five-star general two-term president who just happened to be president exactly when MIC was consolidating its Korean War gains. Ike was like "holy crap this horrible thing happened on my watch but I had no idea!" The most charitable interpretation is that he acquiesced in the burgeoning abomination to protect his son's military career.

nice quotation.

We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.

Here's an attempt to update that comparison:

The lowest estimate I could find for one F35 is about $110 million. One bushel of wheat has ranged from $5 to $6 recently. I'll use $6 here.

At these prices an F35 would buy more than 18 million bushels of wheat, or 36 times as much as Eisenhower's 500,000 estimate.

https://www.nasdaq.com/markets/wheat.aspx

I see someone else has already brought the quote from Dwight D Eisenhower, but I would like to hoist a quote of my own from a previous thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18179654

Since WW2, the question "if this doesn't work, am I or someone I know going to get killed?" has been false for the people designing, organising, funding and procuring these systems.

Sure, that money actually paid people to do work and those people were then able to stimulate the economy, pay for their education, all that good stuff.

But that same money could have been spent to actually do something useful and it still would have had that economic impact.

*And now I see where everyone else already made this extremely obvious point.

We spent $1 trillion on the war in Iraq in 10 years. Another trillion in Afghanistan. Our budget deficit starting next year will be $1 trillion a year for the next decade.

While I think the F35 project was a mess, there are even bigger problems in comparison.

The interest on the debt is going to grow to an incredible amount:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-skyrocketing-interest-payme...

There's no reason to suspect that my opposition to the F-35 implies support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, I'll be explicit: the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were and are shameful, deplorable wastes of human life and resources.

"Over the next decade, interest costs will total nearly $7 trillion, rising to become the third-largest 'program' in the federal budget."

If you thought a trillion dollars over thirty years for the most advanced jet in the world was a lot of money, how do you feel about getting absolutely nothing for $7 trillion?

It’s even worse, since there is also the opportunity cost of what could have been done with all the time & materials. A purely direct wealth transfer of the net profit would at least save that all, which could have gone into something else.

And possibly also environmental costs.

This is an overreaction.

The F35 is a maturing platform. Issues are being ironed out and the result will be an incredible aircraft far beyond any other fighter currently flown. There is a product.

The run away price tag certainly shows inefficiencies of contracting at this scale. Accountability is not really there for companies that do not perform to the level required to honor their contracts. Patents, required expertise, and other logistical hurdles keep competitors few.

Building military systems is not software, there are so many considerations and potential roadblocks. Tests cost millions and take months to years. Think of how difficult and expensive it is to make an iPhone--iPhones don't have to perform deft aerial maneuvers at Mach speed, win the (complex as hell) radar/sensor game of cat&mouse, and hit things with missiles. $1 trillion sounds like a lot, but keep in mind our beloved iPhone company is worth about that much. My iPhone 8 certainly provides me more direct value as an individual, but the capability of an F35 is not a cheap thing.

I mean it's not like the money just went into a hole. These things were built by U.S. factories. Not the best use of taxpayer money by any means, and we are right to be angry, I just want to point that out.

Misallocating labor is worse than throwing the money into a hole. The money itself doesn't matter, it's just an accounting tool.

I mean it's not like the money just went into a hole.

It went into a big ol' hole that had a billboard next to it labelled "Opportunity Cost".

How do you ratify the hidden benefits of advanced researches going along with the aircraft? Have you seen the flight helmet with integrated HUD? I think it is out of this world. And it is just one of the many advanced technologies created in the process. Saying this is a waste of money is akin to say NASA mission is a waste of money.

I hate the argument that we should tolerate wasteful military spending because it sometimes creates accidentally results in useful applications. For $1 trillion dollars, how many millions of worthwhile discoveries could have been devised by directly investing in scientific research?

Saying that military spending is a worthwhile vehicle for useful research is akin to saying that a worthwhile way to power a car is to use gasoline to heat a water boiler to drive a steam turbine. The inefficiency is astounding.

Broadly speaking...didn't we lose just the after tax profit that companies made? Of course there's an opportunity cost but this is FedGov, not exactly known for using tax dollars as best they could /should.

Is it that embarassing ? I couldn't find a good summary about the state of F-35s.

I don't think 150usd per year is a huge amount of money (12.5 per month). (Sure for some it's vital, I'm not saying this).

Military..

It amounts to about $100 million every single day, if that helps make the absurdity more clear.

> No value has been provided

Well... The US, and every country that's paying attention learned how not to build a military plane.

I'm kind of baffled by the number of people here defending this. I can only imagine that Americans have an emotional investment in their military that inclines them to overlook waste that they would never tolerate in any other area.

> I'm kind of baffled by the number of people here defending this

With literally trillions of dollars at stake, why wouldn't defense contractors set up "marketing" teams to defend it?

And the post above: "adversaries are posting about how bad it is to run support for it" -- a perfect dodge. If you're not supporting this gigantic fucking money pit then you're clearly in league with the enemy.

Considering that this has been flagged off the front page after receiving 92 upvotes in one hour, I'd say you may be on to something.

And the Trump tax cut will grow the debt by a trillion dollars in just 10 years[1]. So in a sense you and everyone else are just buying this on your credit card and letting your grand kids pay it off.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/25/business/trump-corporate-...

Out of curiosity, does the 250 million taxpayers include tax paying businesses?

Nope, and although that suggests that $150 would be an overestimate (if we disregard the huge portion of taxes that are earmarked for social security, individual income tax contributes 80% of government revenue), this is countered by 1. the fact that the $1 trillion price tag is a low-ball estimate, 2. the fact that the tax base was 50 million fewer 30 years ago, and 3. the unlikelihood that the price tag is adjusting for inflation, which would increase the real value of contributions over the past 30 years (according to CPI, prices in 2017 were 87% higher than prices in 1990).

Aren't the same tax payers paying for the business taxes as well through the increased price of goods?

> "No value has been provided..."

There is value provided. These planes support the US world hegemony and are amazing centerpieces of the US military. If you argue that we could have done it for cheaper, that is fair. But there is value in them.

Only if they work consistently, which they've yet to start doing.

JDAMs, NATO, and the Petr-Dollar are doing more for US Hegemony than these overpriced drone-stop-gaps ever will.

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