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It didn't cost a trillion dollars to development. The trillion dollar number everyone always loves to throw around is for the total lifetime cost (i.e., to 2070) to $1.5 trillion in then-year dollars which also includes operations and maintenance.


The F-35B costs (currently- it's growing by the day) roughly a third of a billion dollars each in acquisition cost alone.

That's over a quarter billion pounds.

To put that in perspective: the pre-primary and primary education budget for the entire country, in 2016, was 800 million pounds.

Do you think MPs will hand-wring about this plane being flushed down the drain as much as they do about fiscal prudence in early education expenses?

I wonder if UK teachers spend their personal funds on school supplies like teachers in the US do.


> To put that in perspective: the pre-primary and primary education budget for the entire country, in 2016, was 800 million pounds.

That doesn't sound right. This page says the UK spent 31 billion on pre-primary and primary education in 2020

https://www.statista.com/statistics/298910/united-kingdom-uk...

(If that has a paywall, try googling for the info, which is how I was able to view the page.)

Please help me understand the discrepancy or edit your comment.


Its not right -- there are about 4.6M primary school publicly funded students in the UK.

Source : https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

The UK did not spend 173 pounds per student for a year of education -- the 30B cost leads to per student spending of about $6500, which is starting to approach a reasonable figure.


I don't think your spending figures are right. An up to date F-35 does not cost anywhere near 330 million.


I personally love that number.

That number has kept me employed for 7 years so far and will continue paying my rent cheques long after its necessarily.

Long live the global murder complex.




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