Human Infrastructure is too Expensive?

 I’ve been sitting back watching some members in Congress fret about the cost of providing healthcare, affordable childcare and family leave for Americans. Seems like every other wealthy country can afford these things but here oh hell no. How would we pay for that? Maybe some of our billionaires wouldn’t be able to run their own space program. Maybe not be able to afford another mansion they won’t live in. Maybe that new mega yacht would have to wait a year or two. Let’s take a look at defense spending. 

The floating turd pictured above is the USS Michael Monsoor a Zumwalt class destroyer. The navy originally intended to buy 32 of these ships at a cost of $1.3 billion each for a total of $41.6 billion. After changing the design and the ship’s mission capabilities the total number the navy is building is 3. So the cost per ship went up to over $9 billion each for a total of over $27 billion. That total is still a moving target because the ships are not combat operational yet and the navy is going to replace their 155 mm cannons and radar systems.

Let’s start with the 155 mm cannon. It’s perhaps too easy to make penis jokes about cannon and projectile sizes and rates of fire so I’ll skip that. The cannon is going to be replaced with a hypersonic missile system after the navy determined the cost of shells for the 155 mm gun were too expensive. A reasonable person would wonder about the numbers. In 2001 the rounds called Long Range Land Attack Projectiles (LRLAP) with a range of up to 75 miles were projected to cost $50,000 each and inflation adjusted to 2016 about $68,000 each. The actual cost ends up being $800,000 per round. Surprisingly even the navy found this too expensive. They did manage to buy 150 for testing. Estimated cost $120 million. So they are going to replace that gun because they don’t have any other ammunition developed for it. So the big cannon has no purpose. I’d tell you about the cost of the hypersonic system but I haven’t found cost estimates for that yet. I do note that cruise missiles cost between 1 and 1.5 million each but why do that when the Congress will throw money at you for a new system.  

Radar upgrades? I’m sure those will cost plenty as well. You get the idea. If we want a new weapon system or some other national defense bauble cost doesn’t seem to be an issue. Take care of your people? Affordable prescription medications? Gee, that seems pretty expensive. Might not be able to afford $800,000 shells for our big scary gun.