Lucylastic
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quote:
ORIGINAL: BamaD
quote:
ORIGINAL: crazyml
Wait? Wasn't this thread intended to be about the ignorance of liberals?
Blimey.
I know this is going to sound completely fucking crazy... but there are some people, even in the military, who believe that upgrading the long range bomber fleet isn't going to make a whole hell of a lot of difference to ISIS.
I know this will seem fantastical to some people, but it could be that fair trade, education, support for economic development and the raising of people out of poverty might be better ways of combating the likes of ISIS.
If you have to convince people of the rightness of western democratic values by shooting them, you've sorta lost the argument.
I never said that a long range bombers would stop ISIS, but something like 90% of our air power is base on 40 year old designs.
A couple of months ago, for example, there was a move to eliminate the A10 because it is so old, but there was no replacement even in the works. Fanatics like ISIS don't care about things like poverty.
It would be nice to know how you bring people out of poverty who will shoot you on sight.
Just days before its international debut at an airshow in the United Kingdom, the entire fleet of the Pentagon’s next generation fighter plane — known as the F-35 II Lightning, or the Joint Strike Fighter — has been grounded, highlighting just what a boondoggle the project has been. With the vast amounts spent so far on the aircraft, the United States could have worked wonders, including providing every homeless person in the U.S. a $600,000 home.
It’s hard to argue against the need to modernize aircraft used to defend the country and counter enemies overseas, especially if you’re a politician. But the Joint Strike Fighter program has been a mess almost since its inception, with massive cost overruns leading to its current acquisition price-tag of $398.6 billion — an increaseof $7.4 billion since last year. That breaks down to costing about $49 billion per year since work began in 2006 and the project is seven years behind schedule. Over its life-cycle, estimated at about 55 years, operating and maintaining the F-35 fleet will cost the U.S. a little over $1 trillion. By contrast, the entirety of the Manhattan Project — which created the nuclear bomb from scratch — cost about $55 billion in today’s dollars.
“The political armor of the F-35 is as thick as the heads of the people who designed the airplane and its acquisition plan,” Winslow Wheeler, a former congressional staffer and outspoken critic of the F-35, recently told Foreign Policy about the longevity of the plane, despite the many setbacks it has endured. The support for the F-35 is so great in Congress that there’s actual a bipartisan Joint Strike Fighter Caucus dedicated to promoting it and keeping it alive. With that in mind, here are just a few of the other things that the insane amount spent on the troubled fighter could have gone towards instead, both at home and abroad:
Buying Every Homeless Person In The U.S. A Mansion
On any given night in 2013, the Department of Housing and Urban Development concluded, there were an estimated 600,000 homeless Americans living on the streets. Numerous studies, however, have showed that rather than putting money into temporary shelters or incarceration, communities have saved millions of dollarsby investing in permanent homes for the homeless. A recent report showed that in one Florida community, it cost taxpayers an estimated $30,000 to take the homeless off the streets through traditional methods, but only around $10,000 per person to give them permanent housing and provide job training and other support. Expanding that concept to the Federal level, even taking into account things like varying real estate prices around the country, it’s possible that $7.4 billion would be more than enough to start a program nationwide. With the full amount spent on the F-35 at its disposal, the U.S. could afford to purchase every person on the streets a $664,000 home.
http://www.mintpressnews.com/americans-spent-enough-money-broken-plane-buy-every-homeless-person-mansion/193758/
http://www.arizonadailyindependent.com/2014/04/25/the-cost-to-acquire-the-f-35-has-gone-up-compared-to-last-years-estimate/
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