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As I understand it, the F-35 was supposed to be a cheap fighter... but then people kept wanting more and more capability, and didn't want to make the tradeoffs required to keep cost down.
It was supposed to be a cheap fighter in the same way that the Affordable Care Act was supposed to lower the cost of healthcare in the US by bending the cost curve, which is to say that this is merely how it was sold to John Q. Public[1]. In reality, the F-35 is a large scale
graftpatronage program that ultimately happened to produce a thoroughly overpriced and under-performing hangar queen of a 5th generation fighter for multiple trillions of dollars more that the US otherwise would have spent on developing separate aircraft tailored to specific needs, but institutional knowledge had decayed to the point where the lessons of the past had largely been forgotten and thus needed to be repeated.[1] Whether or not this is related to "the stupidity of the American voter" is a separate question. On the gripping hand, the F-35 passed during a comparatively information-starved period of time where it was relatively trivial for politicians to get away with saying one thing while doing another. Moreover, WRT the ACA specifically, while Americans did indeed want something to be done about the cost of their healthcare and their access to same, the ACA was unimpressive enough that there was widespread dissatisfaction with what congress was actually proposing, so much so that Massachusetts voters actually voted in a Republican to Ted Kennedy's vacant seat in order to try and tank the whole thing before the differences were worked out between the House and Senate versions of the bill, which of course Nancy Pelosi solved by having the House pass the Senate version of the bill. On the sinister hand, far too many folks ultimately go back to hugging their televisions rather than actually updating their priors.
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