My problem is that these are the people who are up in arms about deficits and public debt, yet find it so easy to rationalize spending money we don't have when it fuels the war machine, but not when it helps people get access to healthcare, or education, or affordable food, etc...
I wrote back to this official today, below is the bulk of my message:
'These jobs are clearly important to Arizona, indeed several of
my friends work for local companies who rely heavily on government contracts.
And my employer’s single largest global customer is the DoD, so we will feel it
too.
But the fact is, out-of-control military spending is a key
driver of our budget deficits and national debt. Experts agree that we can
clearly secure our borders and retain a massive force of dissuasion around the
world with a much smaller budget. We spend more in this area than the next 10+
biggest spending countries combined, including China and Russia. This runaway
spending is in fact a huge competitive disadvantage for the US, and does not
buy us more security than we would have with 5-10% less spending.
I don’t wish for Arizona to lose any good paying jobs. But in
these times of so much complaint about government handouts and welfare and
borrowing, it’s time for these companies to develop growth strategies that
aren’t so dependent on public funds. Balanced budgets and reduced deficits are
key to our long term competitiveness. If we agree on that, we have to concede
that military expenditures can’t exceed a certain proportion of government
spending, and right now they are way out of proportion.
What can Arizona do to help these companies de-militarize their
focus, and instead shift their engineering and manufacturing talent to building
the energy and transportation and communication systems of the future, and do
it with private capital investment, not taxpayer subsidies? I think that’s
where their future lies, and if we can be the State to help them do it, it will
help attract outside investment and create many more good paying jobs in
Arizona. We have world-class scientists and researchers at ASU and UofA already
working on these topics, attracting hundreds of millions of dollars in research
investments and producing enormous economic value to Arizona, this is also
something we should seek to accelerate and scale'.
