Hiltzik column: The C-17, jobs and the economy
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The Senate voted this week to give Boeing’s C-17 military cargo plane a reprieve, appropriating $2.5 billion to save 5,000 jobs in Long Beach and another 25,000 scattered strategically around the country. But nobody thinks that solves the problem of what to do with a program that Congress likes and the Pentagon would like to shut down. Is the Defense Department shortsighted or Congress spendthrift? And how many heavy airlifters does the Air Force really need, anyway?
My Thursday column, which begins below, examines how decades of half-baked U.S. defense and economic policy have brought us to the point where the country is down to a single factory capable of manufacturing a heavy military plane, and that one faces extinction. The elements are: a Pentagon establishment that can’t figure out what it needs and can’t plan ahead and a Congress that views all economic policy through the murk of the pork barrel.
And here’s the punchline: The C-17 is a great aircraft, but that barely figures into the debate.
If you’re interested in contemplating the harvest of this country’s decades of failed economic policies, failed military policies, and just plain failed politics — and who isn’t? — I know just where to send you.
It’s a Boeing aircraft factory on the outskirts of Long Beach Airport, where a brigade of 5,000 veteran workers can turn out 16 state-of-the-art C-17 military cargo planes every year.
This is the last factory in America capable of building large military aircraft, and it’s headed for extinction.
-- Michael Hiltzik
