A Bright Future In Dayton

[Ohiogirl81]

Originally Posted by unusualfire

Wright Patterson looks to be in trouble. It looks like 13,000 with go without pay for a month. I hope they don't close the base all together in the future.

Is that a result of budget cutting, or Congressional ineptitude?

[ohio_peasant]

DoD-wide the impending "sequester" threatens to furlough several hundred thousand civilian employees. Adding the other affected agencies in the Executive Branch, and the total figure is about 900,000 federal employees who will be losing potentially 20% of their pay starting in April and continuing through September 30 2013.

The reason is a "doomsday" scenario in the bickering between Congress and the President. It was never intended to be triggered, but is getting triggered because of intransigence by both sides. I'll skip the political commentary blaming one side more than the other.

While the crisis is indeed grievous for some, it is not sufficiently palpable for most Americans, and therefore there is little concerted call for action. In fact many people have come to believe that the sequester is actually a good thing, as it forces some federal budget cuts, if not necessarily the right cuts.

As Wright-Patterson emerges as the last man standing in Dayton, as the last major high-tech/engineering employer, the region will suffer substantially as some of its most affluent salaried employees suddenly feel 20% less affluent. I don't think that too many people will literally go hungry, but they will cut down on discretionary spending, and of course local tax revenue will also suffer.

I wonder how the sequester will be affecting the Washington DC region, which has even more government employees and whose economy depends even more on their spending and their state/local income taxes.

[Dayton Sux]

I hope they don't close the base all together in the future.

Doubtful. Tho it might be possible to close a part of it (or privatize it).


Wright-Patt is important not becuase of the civ/mil payroll but also becuase it draws in a bunch of defense contractors who operate as sort of consultants and qausi-outsourced actors, and also a few who maintain a "storefront" presence.

There was always the hope that the R&D at the base would lead to some commercial spin-off. So far the only example of that happening in a big way (in terms of a firm based on defense tech that grew into a big employer) was the computer science work that was the foundation for Lexis-Nexis.

There might be some smaller things going on, but this isnt in the news much.