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$399 billion could virtually end hunger in America.
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Or, you know, we could kill more innocent people halfway across the world. Yeah, let's do that.
America!!!
The Pentagon's $399 Billion Plane to Nowhere
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Re: The Pentagon's $399 Billion Plane to Nowhere
#12We're just lucky that this sort of boondoggle only happens in the military. Imagine how much trouble we'd be in if the rest of our government were engaged in this kind of corruption and/or ineptitude!
Re: The Pentagon's $399 Billion Plane to Nowhere
#13It would appear this nation's military is a fat, bloated welfare recipient, feeling entitled and too powerful for anyone to do anything about it, impoverishing the nation. We all know it has many brilliant and capable individuals and teams in it who can do great work, but the system is anything but. The money ultimately goes to people, meaning we are paying people to do unproductive work, though I'm sure plenty of it…
All the money we spend on the fighting the wars, yet we can't over spend on treating the veterans. It's really pathetic.
Veterans, yes. But how about all the people who lost their jobs in the US over the last 20 years because of the obvious incompetence of the government to budget in any way that makes sense.
Priorities. If you have a ton of starving and jobless people in your country, you do not spend a quarter of a TRILLION dollars on killing more people. I'm sorry, you just don't.
Re: The Pentagon's $399 Billion Plane to Nowhere
#14... $399 billion could virtually end hunger in America. ... Or, you know, we could kill more innocent people halfway across the world. Yeah, let's do that. America!!!
Oh, that money doesn't include any killing, it's just for designing and building this single tool for it. Actual war fighting is rather more expensive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_War
Re: The Pentagon's $399 Billion Plane to Nowhere
#15I would not be surprised if this cash cow gets cancelled after this recent grounding. This scheme is hardly going unnoticed.
Re: The Pentagon's $399 Billion Plane to Nowhere
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
All the money we spend on the fighting the wars, yet we can't over spend on treating the veterans. It's really pathetic.
Veterans, yes. But how about all the people who lost their jobs in the US over the last 20 years because of the obvious incompetence of the government to budget in any way that makes sense. Priorities. If you have a ton of starving and jobless people in your country, you do not spend a quarter of a TRILLION dollars on killing more people. I'm sorry, you just don't.
Getting people to work means more people paid, more jobs. How does a large govt project reduce available jobs? Not following.
Re: The Pentagon's $399 Billion Plane to Nowhere
#17Pierre Sprey (F-16's designer) on the F-35 "The F-35 was born of an exceptionally dumb piece of airforce PR spin" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxDSiwqM2nw
Good interview. Problems he's mentioning is basically true for any complex engineering problem:
- stakeholders with different agendas building a common product does not work well
- one size does not fit all
Same is true for software, etc.
Re: The Pentagon's $399 Billion Plane to Nowhere
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
All the money we spend on the fighting the wars, yet we can't over spend on treating the veterans. It's really pathetic.
Veterans, yes. But how about all the people who lost their jobs in the US over the last 20 years because of the obvious incompetence of the government to budget in any way that makes sense. Priorities. If you have a ton of starving and jobless people in your country, you do not spend a quarter of a TRILLION dollars on killing more people. I'm sorry, you just don't.
Actually government jobs programs kind of directly affect joblessness and hunger. The question is whether this is the right kind of jobs program. Fixing infrastructure would create more jobs with a greater multiplier (construction workers are lower paid and spend more of their income) and produce lasting value.
Edit: weird typo.
Re: The Pentagon's $399 Billion Plane to Nowhere
#19> "An upfront question with any program now is: How many congressional districts is it in?" said Thomas Christie, a former senior Pentagon acquisitions official. The military-industrial complex runs deep...and it goes to show how little we can rely on politicians to confront it. If you were a Representative from the few regions that still has an industrial base, it would be easy to justify just another "Yes" vote, fo…
The problem with this type of spending, whether or not it does create jobs, is that it is inherently wasteful. If it were a good plane, and not a political show pony, I'd let it off the hook. But billions are being poured into this fancy paperweight, when that money could more readily benefit programs like NASA (I am a fan of private space enterprise, but if we are going to go nuts with the political budget, might as…
I don't know if these programs necessarily need to be inherently wasteful. We need a military to wage war, the military needs planes, it needs to renew its fleet, and then projects need to get started to design these planes.
Now, this project seems like a disaster. But it appears to be run under the old rules of Pentagon procurement (cost plus) instead of performance based budgets.
Let's just consider this $trillion just another boost to the economy, this time not through the banking industry, but through the military. We need a military, and sometimes the redistribution of wealth needs to reach them too if we want to keep them around for when we need them to build space ships, bombs and other necessary war products.