Or, to be more efficient, we could funnel the money going towards the F-35 to productive uses that would employ as many people and actually create value. Saying the F-35 is good because it creates jobs is an example of the Broken Window fallacy; [1] we’re expending economic effort for no purpose, much like you can’t create economic growth by going around breaking windows so the glazier industry can have a boom. As I said in another comment, we might as well had spent the $1.5 trillion to build a fleet of metal platypuses that we keep in large hangars around the world. The existence of an F-35 has no practical use to the U.S. economy other than as a money sink.
If you would like to use broken windows as an example the parable doesn't apply exactly. For it to apply the same way it would mean both providing a job (by giving funds to do so) to fix the broken window/damaged buildings as well as having a need to fix the damage, versus simply having a natural distaster/broken window and hoping that works as economic stimulation.
The broken window fallacy/parable has no notion of outside money being inserted into the system and is a poor characterization of the F35 program/deficit fiscal spending.
That is the critical difference. Also these forms of spending are already empirically proven as being net beneficial due to a financial multiplier/accelerator.
So if I’m understanding your argument correctly, you consider the F-35 to effectively be a wealth redistribution program. Taxes are gathered from taxpayers nationwide, and some of that money is funneled into the communities where the F-35 is designed and built. I’m 100% down with wealth redistribution as a way to reduce income inequality, but I think we could be way more efficient in the redistribution; we could employ these people and use this money to create actually useful things, like say construct affordable housing or construct anything other than a $1.5 trillion lemon. That was why I mentioned the parable; the idea is that value isn’t added when you introduce an artificial, costly phenomenon into an economy (i.e. a storm that creates demand for repairs or a worthless fighter jet that creates demand for defense workers). But if you instead use that money to build productive things, then you can get the redistribution and actually make something that someone wants. Thus, it is impossible for the F-35 to be as efficient at wealth distribution as say an equivalent costing program to create working civilian aircraft that could actually be used.
The most efficient way of redistribution would be to use the money spent on the F-35 to directly fund social programs and jobs programs for the poor in these economically disadvantaged communities; this would redistribute all of the money to people who actually need it and will spend it, rather than send huge chunks of it into defense executives/shareholders’ pockets in the currently lossy transactions used in defense contracting.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window