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The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

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Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#791
post #757

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always wished for (and wanted to develop) a calculator which would take in your taxes paid, and calculate exactly how many dollars and cents of your tax bill went to which programs. I'm sure the results would shock most Americans.

> Federal Reserve Actions Printing dollars what means high inflation what is basically a hidden tax that screws lower and medium class the most?

That’s pretty theoretical at this point, though; it’s been quite a while since we had high inflation.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#792

The saddest thing about all of this IMO is they have been working on this for 14 years, and how much money was spent/wasted? Now, read about Skunkworks - they were able to build the SR71 (without supercomputers) in less than half that time and for a fraction of the cost. This isn't just planes, this seems to be everything nowadays. Fission was discovered in 1938/1939 and we dropped two bombs on Japan in 1945. No chan…

Crispr, while awesome, has not yet turned into real concrete technology that is making our lives better. I think the best example of serious technological advances recently is the mRNA vaccines.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#793

Putting aside the good-plane/bad-plane discussion, this program is the poster child for one of my pet wishes: that the costs of government programs would be expressed in $/tax-payer. There are about 100M tax payers in the US; this program is expected to cost about $1,500,000M; so the F35 program is expected to cost about $15,000 per tax payer. True: that's over 50 years; still, un-discounted, that's $300/year/tax-pay…

I've always wished for (and wanted to develop) a calculator which would take in your taxes paid, and calculate exactly how many dollars and cents of your tax bill went to which programs. I'm sure the results would shock most Americans.

The problem with that is that there is no direct correlation between tax receipts and budget outlays. Money being spent in 2021 is not being "paid for" by taxes received in 2021, or for that matter in 2022, 2023, or any other particular year. That's the theoretical problem; the practical problems you encounter as a result include how you deal with programs that are technically 'paid for' by specific taxes (do you try to present those separately or exclude them?), how you account for budget deficits (do you present a breakdown that adds up to >100% of the tax bill?), and how you deal with tax expenditures.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#794

Putting aside the good-plane/bad-plane discussion, this program is the poster child for one of my pet wishes: that the costs of government programs would be expressed in $/tax-payer. There are about 100M tax payers in the US; this program is expected to cost about $1,500,000M; so the F35 program is expected to cost about $15,000 per tax payer. True: that's over 50 years; still, un-discounted, that's $300/year/tax-pay…

I've always wished for (and wanted to develop) a calculator which would take in your taxes paid, and calculate exactly how many dollars and cents of your tax bill went to which programs. I'm sure the results would shock most Americans.

There’s something similar for the UK here[0], but my guess is that most people don’t care beyond “defence”, which in the UK is 5% and the US is 15%. As others have mentioned though, there’s potentially a pretty good multiplier effect [1] on military hardware acquisition.

0: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/how-public-spendi...

1: https://www.economicsonline.co.uk/Managing_the_economy/The_m...

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#795

Putting aside the good-plane/bad-plane discussion, this program is the poster child for one of my pet wishes: that the costs of government programs would be expressed in $/tax-payer. There are about 100M tax payers in the US; this program is expected to cost about $1,500,000M; so the F35 program is expected to cost about $15,000 per tax payer. True: that's over 50 years; still, un-discounted, that's $300/year/tax-pay…

You need to baseline with the cost of no COVID bailout: economic collapse, breadlines, etc.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#796

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> pork spending was mostly outlawed in 2011 Is there a longer discussion of this that you can link somewhere? I remember the phrase as a derogatory commonplace in adults' political discussion when I was a child, but the concept seems to have drifted out of the discourse since, and having now had my attention drawn to its absence I'd be interested to find out more about why.

There's definitely still pork. I mean, look at how many pet projects were included in Covid relief funding. Pork is the idea of stuffing an unrelated project to benefit your local district or state (and thus, the politician's reelection chances) into a bigger bill that is unrelated to that expense. Like the most famous one was the Alaskan "bridge to nowhere" that would have cost $400 million: https://en.m.wikipedia.o…

What pet projects in Covid relief funding are you talking about?

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#797

Putting aside the good-plane/bad-plane discussion, this program is the poster child for one of my pet wishes: that the costs of government programs would be expressed in $/tax-payer. There are about 100M tax payers in the US; this program is expected to cost about $1,500,000M; so the F35 program is expected to cost about $15,000 per tax payer. True: that's over 50 years; still, un-discounted, that's $300/year/tax-pay…

Pretty clearly unsustainable, isn't it?

Money stays in the system... of course with a bit of a bias in what direction it goes.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#798

Putting aside the good-plane/bad-plane discussion, this program is the poster child for one of my pet wishes: that the costs of government programs would be expressed in $/tax-payer. There are about 100M tax payers in the US; this program is expected to cost about $1,500,000M; so the F35 program is expected to cost about $15,000 per tax payer. True: that's over 50 years; still, un-discounted, that's $300/year/tax-pay…

how much is not getting your throat slit by our enemies worth?

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#799
post #662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue is if you are going to order a million toilets, then moving all the risk to the contractor is fine. If you are asking for innovation and R&D, then the contractor already has a ton of risk. Add in requirements to make a fighter suitable for all branches of the military, and the risk is gigantic. In that environment, you need to remove risk from the contractor. This is why R&D projects can't be treate…

So don't do it fixed price but do cap allowable profits to 3-5% or so. That was how Apollo program was run.

They also cap profits based on the original bid size. So you bid 20 million for the F35 program you get 1.5 million profit. When you overrun the 20 million to 30 million you still only get 1.5 million "profit". Typically you also have to go ask for that 10 million in piecemeal as well. I need 500k to do this and 500k to do that and the program office approves or disapproves.

Of course, the contractors probably skim a little bit off the top of the 20 million back to themselves. They might for example bill for machine team on the CNC or charge $200/hr per an employee and only pay $60 (note that they have expenses for training, downtime, office space, equipment and management which that 200/hour needs to account for so the employee isn't getting screwed that badly.

Less moral contractors might build projects which intentionally fail but meet the specifications so that the gov't needs to execute a change order at which point they would get additional fee as part of the change order, however with the DOD you can get your company put on a blacklist which will mean you cannot win any more DOD contracts. But I have heard of a California construction company doing that repeatedly over the course of 30 years successfully. In the dod world, most companies try to propose improvements to the original contract. Typically they will have yearly goals associated with submitting and winning change orders as its an easier source of revenue than bidding and winning new contracts which typically have a 30% win rate.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#800

Putting aside the good-plane/bad-plane discussion, this program is the poster child for one of my pet wishes: that the costs of government programs would be expressed in $/tax-payer. There are about 100M tax payers in the US; this program is expected to cost about $1,500,000M; so the F35 program is expected to cost about $15,000 per tax payer. True: that's over 50 years; still, un-discounted, that's $300/year/tax-pay…

I've always wished for (and wanted to develop) a calculator which would take in your taxes paid, and calculate exactly how many dollars and cents of your tax bill went to which programs. I'm sure the results would shock most Americans.

That would be great to see.

Not exactly what you're describing, but here's where someone did a fairly detailed analysis of which federal, state, and local programs their salary goes to using a Sankey diagram:

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/lkfjea/oc_...

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