That jet the Marines lost? Taxpayers will pay $1.7 trillion for the F-35 program

A version of this story appears in CNN's What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.

The military losing a fighter jet near Charleston, South Carolina, and asking the public to help find it is a plotline in which "Top Gun" (fighter jets) meets "The Hunt for Red October" (country can't find its weapons system).

But the larger story of the F-35 Lightning II stealth fighter is like tax dollars meet "The Blob" (unstoppable force consumes everything in its path).

"How in the hell do you lose an F-35?" wondered Rep. Nancy Mace, the South Carolina Republican, in a post on social media that speaks for everyone who read the headline about the state-of-the-art military plane that went missing Sunday after its pilot ejected and parachuted to safety.

"How is there not a tracking device and we're asking the public to what, find a jet and turn it in?" she continued.

A more general and important question could be asked of the F-35 program writ large: How in the heck can you spend so much money on a plane that doesn't work the way it's supposed to?

The exact amount of money for a single aircraft like the one that went missing is somewhere around $100 million.