President Trump’s huge military spending increase is based on a false premise: that more money means more security. If anything, the debacle of the F-35 fighter should demonstrate that massive military spending with no real purpose not only does not deliver more security but in fact undermines our security. A bigger military budget does not make us safer. It makes defense contractors and the revolving-door Pentagon officials much richer while emboldening the kinds of interventionist foreign policy that actually makes us more hated and thus vulnerable to attack. More in today’s Liberty Report:
Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.
is this turkey made by General Dynamics? GD just got a $60 million state tax rebate scam in Maine for the Bath Iron Works, building the Zumwalt class of destroyers. And bought back a boatload of their stock. Like, if you had a Third World dictatorship or Our Dictatorship and you see that country in turmoil and the King or Commander in Chief grabbing up the available cash, you’d expect a coup about to happen, yeah? And if the “revolutionary” leader was having a finger to the nose nod nod wink wink little ol’ bit of collusion, where the departed Old Boss and the New Boss split the purloined treasury… I’ve seen that done on a much smaller scale. Maybe a war or three being started at the same time to draw attention away from the Shenanigans …
Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company.
Its a mere $17 billion dollar company; you wouldn’t know over $400 billion has been pumped into the F-35 program.
Is the $17 billion number its market capitalization? As of 2016, it had annual revenues of nearly $50 billion, annual net income of more than $5 billion.
The F-35 development program started in 1992, so the spending has trickled out over a quarter century, and not nearly all of the money goes to Lockheed. The engines are Pratt & Whitney, the VTOL lift system is by Rolls-Royce, its gatling is by General Dynamics, etc. My guess is that a lot of the money they pad their pockets with is in the design/testing area (for example the solid state laser stuff).
LMT’s market cap is 96 billion. That doesn’t say what its LMT is really worth, just market sentiment for LMT stock.
Lockheed Martin is huge and makes/assembles a lot of stuff, Lockheed Martin Aeronautics makes/assembles the aircraft.
The revenue of the aeronautics unit, Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company, is $US 17 billion according to its Wiki entry, [If I had the industry multiplier the figure would obviously be higher,]
Since its not on the stock market directly, LMAC has no market capitalization to cite.
The operating income of $US 1.8 billion would not reflect LMAC value to Lockheed Martin as well as its revenue.
If one dug deeper, one might find LMAC’s worth in assets to the parent company, but since its not a stand alone company, that might not be accurate either as these can be shuffled about.