Okay, this is something that may or may not become a regular feature. Pretty soon I may have so many regular features I won't have time for anything else. But here it is: It's the Factoid of the Week.The subject is the program to create a fleet of F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jets, which is 7 years behind schedule and a couple of weeks ago was grounded just before two air shows that were supposed to be the jet's coming out party.
Here's the factoid: The entire cost of the program over the projected life of the jets is now $400 billion. That amount could have provided a $600,000 home to each and every one of the estimated 600,000 homeless people in the US.
Or, if you prefer another way to look at it, a single year's cost of the program, about $49 billion, could have covered the entire yearly cost of the National School Lunch Program, which feeds roughly 31 million students every year, eliminate the cuts made in the Food Stamp program, pay our share of UN's 16 peacekeeping missions around the world, and pay the entire amount sought by the UN Office of Coordination for Humanitarian Affairs to address humanitarian crises around the world, including the millions of refugees and internally displaced people in war zones - and we'd still have a few billion left over for dessert.
Sources cited in links:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/11/military-jet-spending_n_5575045.html?cps=gravity
http://thehill.com/policy/defense/budget-appropriations/211520-f-35s-air-show-debut-in-jeopardy
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-07-16/us-approve-limited-flights-for-f-35-joint-strike-fighter/5599896
http://thinkprogress.org/world/2014/07/09/3458101/f35-boondoggle-fail/
http://www.un.org/en/peacekeeping/operations/current.shtml
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