April 22, 2011 Release #11-15
Kirtland AFB officials release Fiscal Year 2010 economic impact statement
KIRTLAND AIR FORCE BASE, N.M. – In Fiscal Year 2010, from Oct. 1, 2009 through Sept. 30, 2010, Kirtland Air Force Base entities infused nearly $7.8 billion into the economy nationwide.
In the local “Economic Impact Region,” which includes all counties within 50 miles of the base, the 2010 impact amount was $4.3 billion. That figure includes $2.2 billion in payroll and more than $2 billion in job creation and expenditures.
Col. Robert L. Maness, commander of the 377th Air Base Wing, the host unit at Kirtland AFB, said the base’s connections with the people and businesses of New Mexico are essential to performing the assigned functions of national security.
“The business relationships between Kirtland Air Force Base and our community partners are key factors in the success of the many missions underway here. In addition to enhancing our ability to carry out the duties entrusted to us, these relationships have cascading benefits beyond the base’s boundaries, as the dollar amounts in the economic impact statement indicate,” he said.
Some highlights of the installation’s 2010 economic impact appear below:
· Kirtland AFB is the largest employer in New Mexico, with more than 21,000 people working on base – estimated to be one of every 14 jobs in the state.
· Small businesses were awarded $428 million in contracts.
· Three major military construction projects totaling $30 million were completed or are in progress.
· The Air Force Research laboratory invests $3 million a year in New Mexico to provide science, technology, engineering and mathematics education outreach to students ranging from fifth grade through graduate school.
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This was my reply:
In his March 10, 2011 NYTimes oped Nobel Laurette Paul Krugman wrote:
Like anyone who writes regularly about what passes for economic and fiscal debate in American politics, I’ve developed a strong tolerance for nonsense. After all, if I got upset every time powerful people were illogical and/or dishonest, I’d spend every waking hour in a state of raging despair.
Yet there are still moments when I find myself saying, “They can’t really be that stupid,” or maybe, “They can’t really think the rest of us are that stupid.”
This is one of those moments, when faced with sufficient economic nonsense, I find myself responding.
The major problem with this PR piece is not that the negative impacts have been excluded from measurement. It is what is being purported as being a "benefit/positive" is itself in fact a "cost/negative".
KAFB spins the money they TOOK from the community as an "infusion" rather than as the "extraction" it actually is. Labor is an INPUT INTO the production process, not an OUTPUT FROM that process. The $2.2 billion is a measure of what is LOST, not what is GAINED.
....of the $7.8 billion that KAFB extorted, they claim to have "invested" (returned) $3million, or about 1/25 of 1% to the schools; and much of that likely is not for teaching how to live better, but how to kill better. So perhaps one hundredth of one per cent could be deducted from the $7.8 billion that former President Eishenhower would have labeled as theft.
That "contribution" pales in comparison to the contribution other criminals, such as Pepe Escobar, returned to his Colombian community, without causing nearly as much devastation.
KAFB is just one of many (LANL, SNL,CAFB, WSMR) military installations in New Mexico, one that by KAFB's own admission consumes one of every fourteen jobs. Could they have someone explain to the community whether they think that if ALL US citizens were employed at high paying military functions how they envision citizens are to live? Do they envision the U.S. being able to extort enough product from other nations in the manner former Executive Director of the Joint Economic Committee James Galbraith describes in his book "The Predator State" ?
Perhaps those employed by KAFB should be forced to sharecrop, to be paid out of the proceeds of what they "produce"? A diet of bombs might reveal the dishonesty of such an accounting system.
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. ---Dwight D Eisenhower, 1953
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it” -- Upton Sinclair
“The efforts of men are utilized in two different ways: they are directed to
the production or transformation of economic goods, or else to the
appropriation of goods produced by others” –Vilfredo Pareto
"What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know for
sure that just ain't so" --- Mark Twain
