Greater Los Angeles got creamed economically with the end of the Cold War: the cutback in defense spending accounts (using my local multiplier guesses) for 2/3 of the rise in unemployment in southern California in the early 1980s.
Hence our fearless Senator Feinstein's pronouncement on the Senate floor that the B2 bomber is a good thing to build because it "...delivers a large payroll..."
>and if so is there not a lot of economic pressure from this driving the
>"outside lobby" mentioned above.?
There are a bunch of people who think that $270 billion a year on defense--more than the next four powers combined, and *all* of the next four powers are our *allies*--is too little. (Look, for example, at Kristol and Kagan in _Foreign Affairs_... last year, I think.) I don't think that they (or most of they) are responding to pressure from either the labor or the capital side of the military-industrial complex. I think most of them are what one might call Clancyites: people who think that high-tech weapons are cool toys, and thus that we should build more of them because of their coolness.
Kind of like Dan Quayle and Mars...
Brad DeLong
Professor J. Bradford De Long Department of Economics, #3880 University of California at Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720-3880 (510) 643-4027; (510) 283-2709 voice (510) 642-6615; (510) 238-3897 fax