Military spending propelled economic growth in Virginia during the past decade. Now that rocket fuel has run out. Fox News reports that the Obama administration “has asked the military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff to cut the Pentagon’s budget request for the fiscal year 2010 by more than 10 percent — about $55 billion.”
It’s not clear how much of that will come of Virginia, but we can make an educated guess. Last year, the Department of Defense spent $56 billion here. If we absorb our “fair share,” we stand to lose $5.6 billion yearly.
Meanwhile, the
Times-Dispatch notes that Virginia could receive as much as $5.8 billion in the Obama administration’s proposed “economic stimulus” package — about as much as we lose from the defense cutbacks. That pinata of pork would provide a one-time injection of some $750 million in transportation funding, $550 million for Medicaid, and $1.58 billion over two years as part of a fiscal stabilization fund. Then the money dries up and we’re back to Business As Usual.
Bacon’s bottom line: Virginia is hosed. Defense cutbacks will be long-term, while the “stimulus” package will provide only a short-term palliative. We will encounter real hardship.
We can deal with this bad news in a chronic crisis-driven mode, taking a series of stop-gap measures, or we can start dedicate ourselves to fundamentally reinventing our economy, our human settlement patterns and our governance system to make us more competitive over the long-haul.
Crisis-driven thinking, or long-term thinking? Which do you think will prevail? Hah! What a foolish question.
Update: Fox News might have gotten the story wrong. According to
CQ Politics, the “cuts” are cuts only in the sense that they are reductions from some astronomical number some DoD bureaucrats had lobbied for. In actual dollars, measured against actual dollars spent last year, the Obama administration would match what the Bush administration recommended, which would be an actual increase.
So, before any one panics, we should make a point of ascertaining who’s got the story straight.
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Military spending propelled economic growth in Virginia during the past decade. Now that rocket fuel has run out. Fox News reports that the Obama administration “has asked the military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff to cut the Pentagon’s budget request for the fiscal year 2010 by more than 10 percent — about $55 billion.” 
