It's not that taxes are theft. It's that these companies get away with going way the fuck over on time and budget, and people are on here saying "oh well they make the money back." No, that's our money, it's not going back to the government or us. Our tax dollars were spent to give another company money to build a plane and sell it to other people, and we don't get any of that money back.
The point being, that complaining that these contractors go way above budget and way over on time, is a completely legitimate complaint. Its fair to complain about how the government spends our money. Saying "oh well, they make the money back," is utterly senseless.
It's like if a contractor said something would cost you $500. But then he buys a $1000 tool and throws that on your quote. But nah no big deal, he'll make the money back on that.
It doesn't make any sense.
Sure it does, because R&D costs are rarely fixed and shit hit's unforeseen snags all the time in aircraft development. This is something that's been true since the Wright Bros took flight. It's more unusual for a next gen air craft to come in anywhere close to budget, than to overrun it.
Skimping on R&D for aircraft development just to stay under budget costs lives, not just money. Same with building ships and a lot of other military equipment. Complaining about political graft is legit; complaining about 'trying to make it fly without killing the pilot or falling apart every 3 hours' work is glossing over how hard R&D work can be and how long the pay off can be.
People made the same complaints about NASA back in the day too, and yet the fact is the money that put Armstrong and Aldrin on the moon paid itself back multiple times over since in the innovations that trickled down tot he civie sector. The money that went into the F-35 has been repaid to the US in general, if not each individual the same way, in our dominance of sea trade and the fact that a growing list of countries are buying it, which is where the foreign export angle shows the quibbles about the R&D are kinda...moot, with the platform in service, the kinks worked out, and the R&D overruns already paying themselves off.
The unknown unknowns of R&D are often where the snags are in terms of R&D costs. Political hold ups or plain corruption can be issues too, but with aircraft it's usually something with getting the airframe up to the potential it has on the plans, and sometimes subcontractors will hit snags that idle the rest of the project for indeterminate lengths of time till the one snag is cleared.
Also, that money does come back to the US and reenter the US economy on the civie side through the civie employees of lots of companies, and not just the usual ones. Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martian, Texas Instruments, 3M, even freaking Johnson and Johnson or Burger King can count as DoD contractors if you cast the net widely enough.
National scale and international scale finance is not the same as personal finance, and the reality is no single individual should consider themselves to have personally paid for anything around the F-35.
So stop acting like the F-35 came out of your personal pocket Roci, it didn't, and this whole notion individual taxpayers are somehow able to act like they get to expect backpayment from military R&D in cash in their own bank account back from the IRS or whomever is...it's nice rhetorical flourish for hardcore libertarian types and some fiscal conservatives who are behind the times, but it's not fiscal reality anymore than the idea that the dollar is worth anything other than what the US Federal Reserve wants it to be at any point. The money printers go brrr for the MIC too, not just for welfare or foreign aid, and all taxes do is pay down the interest on the national debt.
The idea personal finance and national/international finance operate on the same rules and same playing field is one of the most destructive memes that ever infected the US populace, particularly once we left the gold standard and became a fiat currency.