An Internet hub with domestic and international news, analysis, original reporting, and popular features from the left, center, indies, centrists, moderates, and right
« Reuters/Ipsos Poll: Newt Gingrich New Republican 2012 Presidential Nomination Front-Runner
The Hillary Effect: Barnes & Noble NOOK aps for Your PC, Mac & iPad »
Government-Created Jobs
Keefe, The Denver Post
This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.
6 Responses to “Government-Created Jobs”
a durn good point is made-Neither Perry, nor Romney, ‘created’ jobs, yet they both claim to have done so. The Jobs happened because the environment created by their respective approaches to governance was favourable, at the right time, and that’s all.
Still, it’s good to see the hypocrisy deflated a bit-if only a little.
heh. funny image. it may be right, government doesn’t create jobs.
Well, I have to maybe take that back…
He’s doing a bang-up job in Brazil.
It’s a good thing that all the roads, police, fire Departments, public schools are planned, financed, built and staffed by private companies that don’t take a penny of tax dollars from the government.
It’s a good thing that all that basic science that is used to produce new technology & new drugs is paid for by private corporations.
Cannonshop seems to really be reaching for a dig with minimal and/or provably misleading inferences… Again.
The “He’s doing a bang-up job in Brazil” link he posted is void of any actual information on any facts or the reason behind the decision to exclude Hawker Beechcraft from biding but why let that stop him.
The article (& Cannonshop, & RedState.com) doesn’t even know where the contract is going:
But why should not knowing the facts matter when you think you’re on a roll.
Steve, how many firms are competing for that contract…that can actually deliver?
Boeing dropped out early, Lockheed’s not playing, Cessna’s not playing. When competitor number two is DQ’ed with no explanation in the middle of the contest, that leaves competitor number one.
Embraer doesn’t have a production facility in the U.S., minus some dark-horse third outfit that can generate the number of airframes to spec required, it’s going to go to Embraer, who build their birds where?
Brazil.
It’s a billion-dollar contract with potential export to friendly allied nations, Steve-that means six months to a year minimum AFTER tooling up a bunch of people will be working on a production line…somewhere. It could be the U.S., but it’s likely going to be in Brazil.
Now, the T-6 and the Tucano are both single-engine turboprop aircraft, it’s reasonable to presume that this would be a requirement in the RFP for the contract (and the main reason boeing dropped their revisitation of the OV-10, their proposed Light COIN aircraft design). Logistics tells us that the more common parts you have in your military inventory, the cheaper it is to operate your military aircraft, and the easier it is to train mechanics to keep them running(along with reducing training/check-out time for aviators).
USAF already uses the T-6 Texan II, so spares and upgrade parts aren’t terribly difficult to obtain and install between AT-6 (attack/COIN variant) and T-6 (trainer). This ain’t the case with a whole different airframe (such as the Tucano.)
Minus a glaring flaw in the AT-6′s fundamental design, then, the decision pretty much ends up being POLITICAL…
Where does the buck stop, Steve?
Beyond that, there is the question of how competitive a bidding process is, when you eliminate domestic suppliers in favour of foreign suppliers, in a Defense Contracting environment, before the competition itself is over and performance evaluations have been completed (in this case, they haven’t even started yet.)
Call it partisan if you want, but this seems right in line with events a couple years ago regarding a Tanker contract, another foreign supplier, and a heavily democratic district pressuring their reps and senators to do something about it-in that case, it was Boeing (a Unionized company in a heavily democratic state)and EADS (essentially Airbus), and a Dept. of the Air Force that wanted to buy a tanker that would require re-building most of the base facilities serving KC-135 tankers to handle a much larger airframe that weighs more, on a contract to specifically replace the KC-135 with a more efficient model (hint: the Airbus plane uses more fuel, weighs more, and is more in line with a competitor to the KC-10, than the 135, has a larger footprint and requires larger hangars, thicker runways, longer runways, etc. etc.)
In that case, it was also politics driving the argument. Airbus was promising to build the first seven in France, and the rest of the contract in North Carolina (a right-to-work state), but the president was Bush, and the political influences were GOP that time around. I see this as the same game from the other side.