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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

> "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, for something that brings 50-500 well-paying jobs and is ostensibly there to "help America"...and hard to justify why you were one of the few to say "No" when ultimately, your share of the pork is small. But spread that attitude across dozens of representatives...and then you have a pork train that's too hard to stop, even if it is subpar in meeting its objectives. Maybe most projects are like this, it's just that this one kept going for a few hundred billion too far.

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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 well be on things that are useful). This type of spending creates a false economy that is not a meritocracy but (for lack of better words) a porkocracy.

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.

It's true, but the same people voting yes "because jobs" vote no on infrastructure repair and improvement projects - desperately needed work that would also create jobs and have a huge, noticeable positive impact on the general citizenry.

Govn't spending to create jobs is always welfare, no matter where we put the money. Why not put it somewhere that will create the same number of jobs, and have something other than a flaming war plane to show for it?

New defense projects are sexy; bringing this type of work to a district makes politicians seem "innovative", and it's the type of thing that plays well in a campaign speech. Maintaining and expanding infrastructure isn't sexy. It won't keep politicians elected.

Defense job creation is appealing because it's an easy way to use federal money for local benefit. If you want to fix bridges or something, you have to deal with people saying it's your state's or city's responsibility, but everyone agrees that defense is the feds' job.

This sort of boondoggle happens in all corners of our society though. I mean... you like NASA... so I'll use them as an example.

The Challenger blew up because of O-Ring failures. Devices that were needed to seal the different cylindrical sections of an SRB together. Why not simply make the SRB from one big cylinder ? Because it wouldn't fit on a semi truck for shipment to KSC. Why do we need to ship these cylinders, can't we just build them right next to the pad ? Because we needed the jobs in the state they were manufactured in. Sound familiar ?

This really is just how things work. It shouldn't be. And this project gets all the attention because of the spectacular nature of the failure... but it really does happen everywhere. It is the kind of public spending folly to be expected from a democratic republic where each region has its own representatives.

You will find many companies that work in dangerous industries, public or private, have had their share of disasters due to institutional problems.

If you want the result of private companies' work, see: coal mining, oil drilling.

It's not about public versus private. It's about the will to hold ourselves to higher standards.

Nearly upend the global economy with derivatives - no consequences, because the economy is too fragile, because our derivatives imploded. Invade a relatively stable nation on the basis of known lies - no consequences. Compared to that, what does washing a mountain of coal ash into a river amount to? Or betting that Indian Point can survive an earthquake?

And so on down the line. Yesterday there was an article posted about how easy it is to get through university and not learn anything. Because, so far, it is possible to maintain a good reputation for academics and let that slide for the sake of revenue.

This is how you become something less than a first-world country, and how you get surprised by the demotion: Having undermined standards, you can't even measure how far we've slid.

Most military projects, at least. Witness the nightmare of the armed forces' camo wars [0].

[0]: http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21600700-expense...

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