4 ms·

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 plane

by bradfa 8y ago

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.

maxander 8y ago
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.
- spaceribs 8y ago
  But then they would have time to be politically active enough to demand better living conditions and social safety.
- vkou 8y ago
  They could be, but if the program didn't exist, our economic system would not have allocated their labour to productive ends.
  - tadfisher 8y ago
    That's a fairly conclusive statement with no objective basis. Care to elaborate?
    - vkou 8y ago
      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'?
  - function_seven 8y ago
    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.
    - lifeformed 8y ago
      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.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > 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.
  - arcbyte 8y ago
    > 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.
    - kibwen 8y ago
      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.
  - phillipcarter 8y ago
    If it were pitched as R&D then sure, that's fine.
  - ThetaOneOne 8y ago
    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.
    - muro 8y ago
      If the cost is 1T, it's 0.05%.
  - jchrisa 8y ago
    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.
ItsMe000001 8y ago
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.
flylikeabanana 8y ago
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.
- tropo 8y ago
  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.
mr_overalls 8y ago
"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
- wpdev_63 8y ago
  Thank you for sharing this beautiful quote.
  - mr_overalls 8y ago
    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.
    - jessaustin 8y ago
      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.
- HillaryBriss 8y ago
  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.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a21776/f-35-cheaper/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a21776/f-3... https://www.nasdaq.com/markets/wheat.aspx https://www.nasdaq.com/markets/wheat.aspx
pjc50 8y ago
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 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.
mattstreet 8y ago
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.

by bradfa 8y ago

maxander 8y ago

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.

spaceribs 8y ago
But then they would have time to be politically active enough to demand better living conditions and social safety.
vkou 8y ago
They could be, but if the program didn't exist, our economic system would not have allocated their labour to productive ends.
- tadfisher 8y ago
  That's a fairly conclusive statement with no objective basis. Care to elaborate?
  - vkou 8y ago
    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'?
- function_seven 8y ago
  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.
  - lifeformed 8y ago
    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.
JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> 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.
- arcbyte 8y ago
  > 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.
  - kibwen 8y ago
    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.
- phillipcarter 8y ago
  If it were pitched as R&D then sure, that's fine.
- ThetaOneOne 8y ago
  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.
  - muro 8y ago
    If the cost is 1T, it's 0.05%.
- jchrisa 8y ago
  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.

ItsMe000001 8y ago

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.

flylikeabanana 8y ago

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.

tropo 8y ago
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.

mr_overalls 8y ago

"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

wpdev_63 8y ago
Thank you for sharing this beautiful quote.
- mr_overalls 8y ago
  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.
  - jessaustin 8y ago
    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.
HillaryBriss 8y ago
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.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a21776/f-35-cheaper/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a21776/f-3... https://www.nasdaq.com/markets/wheat.aspx https://www.nasdaq.com/markets/wheat.aspx

pjc50 8y ago

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 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.

mattstreet 8y ago

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.