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"How can you call the Joint Strike Fighter "corporate welfare" ? By my definition, "corporate welfare" is unjustified government spending for the purpose of unfairly bolstering certain corporations."
Well, I don't see why corporate welfare should have to favor some corporations needlessly over others. I mean, there are certain criterion that are probably going to need to be satisfied here--you couldn't hand a $200 billion contract off to say, Kistler, that wouldn't make any sense. So, I hear what you're saying about this being a pretty competitive contract by DoD standards, and I think that's probably true from what I can gather, but I don't really think it matters, ultimately. Look, I mean, the purpose of corporate welfare isn't to benefit any selective corporation--it doesn't matter what the name of the company is. The purpose, as far as I can gather, is to maintain certain key interests. Keep companies afloat while they pursue R&D (especially long term R&D), that is, as far as I can see a big issue. Sometimes it is done directly by government order, sometimes it is done by the company itself, but in many cases the company wouldn't be able to do it without the extraneous DoD contracting.
I mean, the airline industry in the 30s was in its infancy really, and it would have gone bankrupt during the depression except for military contracts. Similiarly, nobody was going to pursue research into computers, but the government did, for WWII, and then eventually companies took it when they could make a pretty short term profit out of it, and developed it a lot further. I don't understand as well as I'd like to, why the so-called "free market" lays waste to a lot of these long term interests, but there are a few pointers which I think generally head in the right direction. First of all, I guess what is most obvious to me is that there are several things that the market system really just doesn't take into account--I mean, if you say to people, whoever pollutes the most makes the most profit and gets the most power, and if you don't pollute then you'll go out of buisness, well, of course, you're going to get pollution everywhere, because people are afraid of going out of buisness. Anyway... second of all, I guess the same thing applies to space, really: nobody is going to go looking out for long term human interests in colonizing space, they're all going to be looking out for making the best airplane or something to beat the competition, or, (more generally) sell people some piece of crap that isn't worth very much so they can make a lot of money. That's what the system is all about, remember. You're not supposed to be concerned with human interests, really--you're supposed to make profit, profit, profit. And if you don't, if you do look out for human interests, you'll start losing profits, and you'll be gone.
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$38 billion comes to mind when I think of the JSF. Are you sure it's $200 billion? Sounds very high.
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$200 billion is the cost of the entire program (after all the airplanes have been built, well past 2015.) $38 million is the average flyaway cost of a single F-35 (actually, the price will vary between 30 and 40 billion, depending on the variant.)
"I'm not much of a 'hands-on' evil scientist."--Dr. Evil, "Goldmember"
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Indeed. And I just read that it could eventually be worth $400 billion over the life of the contract after a few decades, and global sales are taken into account.
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american military research is just spending more money on stagnation. there is nothing new or fundamentally better about the JSF. any time progress happens, the program is squashed. no significant number of new planes are made every year, only spare parts for old ones. i know this because i have personal ties to the defense industry.
and as for russia, america had to foot a huge amount of the production of the ISS that was supposed to be made in Russia. If Russia cant support the space station, they cant support Mars missions.
NASA is not to blame for its own stagnation, the government is. The government is responsible for the stoppage of many useful programs, or the creation of pointless others. they also have a tiny budget to work with, and they are forced to spend this money wherever the politicians see an opportunity to glorify themselves.
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