To his children, for $1.
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Well, it’s Trump, so… yeah. My question is: is it the political gain of empty grandstanding against nonexistent “waste,” he’s trying to maneuver this to get tax money to spruce up his private plane, or is it some Boeing stock scam? Or all three? It’s sometimes hard to tell where the stupidity leaves off and the rip-off begins with Trump.
Edit: Shit, I forgot all about the insane bullying. Did he do this primarily because a Boeing executive dared to say something skeptical about him?
The irony of a guy who hasn’t paid taxes and is pretending to be concerned about federal spending, but who is actually the most profligate spender of tax monies of any president ever, for personal gain. Oh, man.
So does he have an angle on that? Is he profiting? Trump likes to talk big about his plans, but I don’t expect he’ll follow through on any that don’t profit him. Not sure which that is.
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Didn’t he tell them that he wanted the Jeffrey Epstein package?
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Oh FFS. Pissing off the captains of industry that pay good money to lobbyists and elected officials is not the way to stay president for long.
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I say let him take Trump One. It doesn’t have antimissile countermeasures. Maybe some kind hearted terrorist would do us a solid and blow him out of the sky.
BTW, speaking of terrorism, I do hope you have all thought far enough ahead to make sure that you don’t stay in any Trump-associated properties for the next four years.
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I know, right? He lost a billion dollars in a single year. He’s a business GENIUS.
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We have some friends who are part-owners of a condo in the Panama City Trump Tower. His cronies on the condo board and the co-located Trump Hotel/Casino really did a number on the condo owners.
I don’t think we’d want President Pence to have a Righteous Mandate and a solid second term.
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Senior GOP Senators. They’re where they are because of their inability to reconcile reality.
emo-pinata-- that’s One Thousand Nine Hudred Eighty Seven Millions of dollars. Not Two million.
$1,987.1 million
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He just. cannot. help. himself. If there was any question of whether he would get his shit together if he was elected (and why - how - could he?), it’s been firmly answered in the negative. It’s a very disturbing indicator, as we know he’ll do the same when an international situation is really serious, because he doesn’t seem to understand he’s president now.
The planes in question would be for the next president - it’s easy for Trump to say no to this when it doesn’t affect him. Even if he flew in his own plane at this point, I’m sure he’d make sure it had been fully retrofitted with all necessary security options, upgrades he’d keep when he left office…
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Airbus showed up for the KC-X competition to provide tankers for the USAF. Their proposal included moving assembly of all A-330 freighters to Alabama.
An amusing point about the C-32: There was a proposal to upgrade the engines (?) of the aircraft used by the Secretary of State to increase its range. This was killed by Senator Ted “Series of Tubes” Stevens (R-Alaska). Without the upgrade, whenever the Secretary of State flies to Asia their aircraft has to stop to refuel in… Alaska.
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The question isn’t “Do we need a super expensive custom airplane to cart the president around in?” The question is “Do we need a NEW super expensive custom airplane to cart the president around in.?” What does ~$4,000,000,000 buy us that we don’t already have? There are plenty of reasons to diss Trumpty-Dumpty. But Cheeto being skeptical about the benefit of replacing some low-hour aircraft with very similar and expensive aircraft is probably not a reason to get all riled up.
Yes, that indeed is a stupid question. All equipment needs replacing and upgrading on a reasonable lifecycle.
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The answer is “yes, we do, when the existing custom airplanes are already getting near the end of their lifespan and will be quite old by the time their replacements are ready”.
$4 billion would most certainly buy a magnificent airplane or three, but Trump pulled that number out of his arse. Right now the only tangible cost Boeing is charging the government is $170 million for a feasibility study. There is no $4 billion airplane being discussed.
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The consensus seems to be that the total cost of the Air Force One replacement program will approach $4 billion. Here’s Politifact’s breakdown of the project cost: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/dec/06/donald-trump/fact-checking-donald-trumps-tweet-air-force-one-bo/
Looks like current estimates are for $3.73 billion over 12 years to produce two airplanes, assuming no budget overruns. The hell of it is that technology is evolving so quickly that whatever we budget for in 2016 will be obsolete by the time these two airplanes exist. I can’t imagine how difficult it would be to work on a project like this.
Interesting – that’s quite different than the $2b number that was being thrown around in the news yesterday for both planes. I think the difference, as you point out, is the massive R&D cost of trying to create these planes, which is really a moving target. So trying to tack an estimate onto it is really sort of impossible.
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Any Air Force One that doesn’t include a Fulton Recovery System is incomplete, if you ask me. How great would it be to see Trump get swooped up like so:
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I’m not sure on what basis the current aircraft are “nearing the end of their lifespan.” They get FAR much less use than commercial airliners. The difficulty is that we will never know the sorts of changes that they want from the current aircraft. Those are secret for good reasons. But the ageing of the air frames or engines are NOT reasons to replace to current aircraft.
Sustaining engineering for a vehicle of that complexity is a reason to plot out a
life-cycle that includes replacement.
Parts, safety, necessary upgrades, it’s not just a modular shell and every single part and replacement parts all have an extreme cost.
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