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Comment by randcraw | Hacker News Reader

1000 aircraft for $1.7 trillion, so each plane costs $1.7 billion. That's nuts.

Umm each plane cost way less than 1.7 Billion. A F35A can be purchased for around $80 million. The 1.7 trillion figure is the cost of research & development, purchasing about 1700 aircraft, and sustaining them for 57 years. So that includes fuel, spare parts, upgrades, pilots, etc, for almost 60 years.

To further elaborate on this, it’s something like a few tenths of total GDP over that period.

Now, depending on how you look at it, you can consider that either a huge number or eminently affordable - I think both are true - but I think it’s a reasonable price for the roles the aircraft is designed to fill over that period.

The cost of each product must include a host of costs that fall outside of the simple manufacturing cost of each. These costs are myriad: R&D, engineering, tooling, maintenance program development, documentation, testing, re-designing, etc, etc. Thus the only fair assessment of the cost of each aircraft must be calculated as COST_OF_PROGRAM / NUMBER_OF_AIRCRAFT.

This phenomenon has been discussed ad nauseum when pricing the development cost of a new pharmaceutical drug. ALL of a pharma's annual corporate research and development costs must be divided only by the number of new drugs that year. Only THAT accurately accounts for the actual cost of developing each drug, given the number of drug candidates that fail during gestation.

Military hardware is no different. Many bids on new contracts fall through. That expense is part of the cost of doing business w/ the military. In fact, if all of Lockheed's many expenditures (productive and unproductive) were divided by the number of its shipped products (w/ cost proportionate to sale price), the actual cost of each shipped product would be substantially higher than is reported. This is an age-old game played by every government contractor to hide the true extent of how much each of their products finally cost the taxpayers. (Not to mention the practice of hiding the high fraction of cost-plus contract overruns in that business.)

From wikipedia:

  > By 2017, delays and cost overruns had pushed the F-35 program's expected acquisition costs to $406.5 billion, with total lifetime cost (i.e., to 2070) to $1.5 trillion in then-year dollars which also includes operations and maintenance

That big number is for the total of acquisition, operations and maintenance from the beginning until 2070.

F-35 has been a component of the US defense since at least 2020, so the taxpayers gets 50 years of F-35 for $1.5 BN, that's 30 billion per year. The US population is currently 332 million. That makes it $2.5 per American citizen per day.

Every morning I get a Grande coffee from Starbucks for $3.97.

I would rather not spend $912 per year for the rest of my life on fighter jets even though you choose to spend $3.97 on coffee everyday.

Then don't?

How do you suggest that I convince the US government not to tax me, or not to spend that money on the f-35 program?

You give up citizenship. You're acting like it's some impossible thing. Close to 10,000 people do so a year.

My money is on you actually enjoying the rest of the benefits America provides so you won't do it.

But if you cared enough, you would.

Sadly, my backup citizenship is Canadian, so I get to pay for F-35s no matter what I do.

On that note, giving up your US citizenship does not in any way prevent you from being taxed by the American government. There is a hefty fee to apply for expatriation, and then there are exit taxes that may have to be paid.

The hefty fee is only $2350, about two years of your F-35 payments.

The exit tax is just your unpaid taxes and only applies to high net worth individuals (over $2 million) or other special circumstances. If you already paid taxes on income, you won't be double taxed. It's basically the pro-rated "final tax bill" because you are leaving in the middle of the tax year.

could we spend that on schools and housing and infrastructure and welfare instead?

There are no lack of spending for schools and housing and infrastructure and welfare.

15% of federal spending is for defense, of which F-35 spending is part of.

To compare, 22% is for social security, 14% is for health, 10% is for medicare, 3% is for education. Note that this is federal, most of education spending is at state and local level.

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

My city (NYC) alone spends $31.5 BN per year for preK-12 education [1]. NYC's population is 8.15 million, or less than 2.5% the population of the entire country.

For $30 BN/year the entire country gets 5th generation gets that are by far the best in the world, and for $31.5 BN a single city gets to fund its public education with results that are (maybe) average for the OECD countries.

[1] https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/spotlight-school-budget-...

Spending it on this is basically that, just one step removed

Nobody prices the cost of discrete products by the number of years of production. That'd be insane.

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