My math and the F-22 Raptor fighter jets

The economy sucks. So I can understand our knee-jerk reaction at the prospect of losing more jobs. Do whatever must be done to save the jobs. But wtf, America? It is estimated to cost AT LEAST $140 million to make these jets. Thousands of jobs would be lost if we were to cut these jets from the Defense's budget. The Air Force is currently asking the administration to sign off on the production of 60 more planes over the next three years. 

60 x $140,000,000 = $8,400,000,000

That's a whole lot of money.

Let's look at the potential job losses. The reports I found said cutting funding for these planes would cost "thousands of jobs" (not hundreds of thousands or millions - still a pretty varied field, there's a huge difference between 1,000 and 90,000).

So, for the sake of this post, we'll crunch a variety of numbers to see how much it'll cost us to keep those jobs building planes Obama referred to as "Cold War-era weapons systems we don't use" in his most recent address. 

To keep 1000 jobs building 60 planes at a minimum estimated cost of $8,400,000,000 = $8,400,000.

To keep 10,000 jobs = $840,000.

To keep 90,000 jobs = $93,333.

My point? My point is this - many apologies to my dear husband who was forced to listen to my tirade in the car on the way to work this morning - why not take a miniscule teeny tiny portion of that money and give it to the people who would have otherwise been employed had we gone forward with the building of those jets? You could give folks options. They could get generous severance packages or we could offer them scholarships to attend trade school or college or even money to help families relocate in the event their skill set could be utilized on some other governmental project (e.g., green energy projects like the one (I believe) California just signed up to do). That makes a helluva lot more sense than creating jets we don't need. Nobody likes the idea of handing over taxpayer money to folks without getting some immediate return on investment. But it seems worse to give tremendous sums of taxpayer money to hire companies to produce items we don't need.