Guest Opinion: Sequestration Cuts Would Devastate Space Coast Economy

Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center

Space Coast Economy Threatened by Congress, Again

By Ronald Cobb
Chairman, Space Coast Defense Alliance
Economic Development Commission of Florida’s Space Coast

It’s time for Congress to get off the dime and take action on the federal budget. Avoiding sequestration must be a priority to avoid a congressionally induced economic calamity for the Space Coast, Central Florida, and the nation. Last year, with the failure of the so-called Super Committee to agree to $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction, Congress decided the only way to cut spending was to put a gun to our head, called sequestration, under the assumption the result would be so unthinkable that surely consensus would be achieved to prevent that debacle. Yet here we are, with a finger on the trigger and Washington doing nothing to avert disaster.

The EDC respects the challenges facing Congress, and we presume they understand the devastating impact sequestration will have on our national defense and our battered local economy. We are extremely puzzled by Congress’ inactivity to address the situation. Sequestration, the automatic, across the board hacking of agency budgets if Congress does not pass an alternative by January 2013, would drain more than $330 million from Brevard County’s economy in 2013, according to the Center for Security Policy. The Aviation Industry Association estimates that sequestration would cost the U.S. more than two million defense and non-defense jobs, with almost 80,000 lost in Florida through fiscal year 2013. Almost 63 percent of those jobs – about 50,000 – would once again be from Brevard and Orange counties.

As a community, we’ve chiseled down the unemployment rate from its peak of nearly 12% in January 2010 to the current 9% rate, through innovation and diversification efforts supported by cities, the county and the state. A process as damaging as sequestration will trigger yet more massive layoffs, producing further damage to the Space Coast defense industry, with a ripple effect into the businesses and the workforce that supports it.

The impending $500 billion in defense cuts threatens the momentum our community has built through the efforts of local economic development partners. All of the progress we’ve made to close the unemployment gap, retain our stellar workforce, and build a diverse economy is now jeopardized. What action is Congress taking?

Patrick AFB, Cape Canaveral AFS and Brevard County’s defense community will all be in jeopardy if Congress does not take action. Florida’s congressional delegation must continue to fight and demand that congressional leaders come up with a tangible solution.

Doomsday looms in January 2013. We must be vigilant in our quest for a resolution. Congress must place the welfare of the people above politics and make the difficult choices that will keep the economy from ruin.

The potential national job loss of millions should consume the U.S. Congress. It must lay politics aside and take action to avert this self-imposed budget cutting exercise that will greatly injure our military readiness and deepen the economic wound. Sequestration is not governing; it is enabling our elected representatives to sidestep leadership at a cost too great to allow.

Ron Cobb is Chairman of the Space Coast Defense Alliance, a council of the Economic Development Commission of Florida’s Space Coast.

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http://zaitcev.mee.nu/space Pete Zaitcev

Sounds like a pefect opportunity for those laid off to stop wasting the money that U.S. Government stole from me on junk like SLS and do something productive for a change.

Also, it looks like Robb Cobb does not live in a country where the debt hit the 16 bil. limit. When the final meltdown comes, EVERYONE is going lose their jobs, not just 9% or 12% or whatever. And the “Space Coast Protection Alliance” will not even be a footnote of history, gone down the drain together with all other special interest groups. That is what at stake. All the smooth-talking about “laying politics aside and taking action” in the world cannot obscure it.
George

“As a community, we’ve chiseled down the unemployment rate from its peak of nearly 12%”

Get my broom, I call shenanigans. It has not declined because people have found work but because we have quit counting them. If you want true numbers you have to look at job creation and the number of new workers entering the workforce. When you do you discover that unemployment has gone UP!
http://behindtheblack.com Robert Zimmerman

This guest opinion is a joke. Sequestration is calling for a 8.2 percent budget cut to NASA’s budget, which will bring the agency’s budget back to numbers it had in 2005. Though that might hurt, it is hardly a disaster. The same thing applies more or less to the defense industry and the field of science. The cuts might hurt in the short run, but in the end they only bring the government’s budget back to spending levels from the period of between 2003 to 2007. And somehow, the government and the aerospace industry survived very well at those levels.

Moreover, in case Mr.Cobb doesn’t remember, the unemployment rate in the period from 2003 to 2007 was far better than what it has been since we began piling up deficits exceeding $1 trillion in 2009. The best way we can improve our economy and thus increase job production is to get the out-of-control federal budget under control. And the only way we will ever do that is to finally take the problem seriously and make some actual cuts.
Michael Turner

Keynes described his fiscal stimulus theory as “moderately conservative in its implications.” And actually, it is. This is the kind of spending I’d want to see ramped way down when the economy is doing well, especially if it’s to clear the way for the entrepreneurial firms and space economy of the future. But with unemployment still so high, cutting spending would only make unemployment go higher — reducing demand across the board, in a death spiral.

“the unemployment rate in the period from 2003 to 2007 was far better.” Yes, on the back of a housing bubble, war spending, and irrational exuberance stoked by what Warren Buffet called “weapons of mass financial destruction.” And who was president then?

Obama’s fiscal stimulus wasn’t passed until early 2009, and couldn’t have had much of an effect for 3-6 months months afterward, with firms still shedding jobs at a rapid rate. By late 2009, job growth finally resumed. Fiscal stimulus was tried (or not) all over the world, because this was a global recession. The numbers are in: it works.

There’s much about the American space program I hate. I wanted to see the Shuttles retired long before this. But when the recession hit, I was in favor of continuing Shuttle flights until a recovery was well under way.

The New Deal was actually the invention of conservative Republican businessman from Utah, Marriner Eccles. He saw first-hand that even the sturdy, tithe-generated Mormon social safety net couldn’t save itself in the face of a catastrophic decrease in demand. How soon we forget. (How few of us ever even knew.)

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