Trump says selling weapons to Saudi Arabia will create a lot of jobs. That’s not true.
The impact of foreign arms sales on the US economy is minuscule.
vox.com
( What it would impact is Trump's condo sales and hotel rentals..)
Excerpt:
..But as it turns out, canceling weapons sales to Saudi Arabia won’t really hurt US jobs much. There aren’t that many American workers making weapons for the Pentagon, much less Saudi Arabia, and MBS isn’t buying enough weapons to put a dent in the US economy anyway.
Overall, the private US defense industry does directly employ a lot of US workers — about 355,500 in 2016, according to the most the recent estimates from the Aerospace Industries Association. But private-sector defense workers make up less than 0.5 percent of the total US labor force, and that includes every person whose job depends directly on the sale or production of airplanes, tanks, bombs, and services for the entire US military. It’s unlikely that many of them, if any, depend directly on weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, and its also unlikely that those jobs would vanish if Saudi money disappeared.
“The relationship between arms sales and jobs is exaggerated,” said William Hartung, an analyst who studies US weapons exports for the liberal-leaning Center for International Policy.
Beyond this, Hartung points out, Saudi Arabia isn’t actually even spending a massive amount of money on American weapons. The kingdom buys the ammunition and bombs it needs to keep waging a bloody war in Yemen, but nothing even close the $110 billion deal Trump touted.
So despite what the president says, there is no real threat of US job losses to justify continued American support for a repressive regime that is likely responsible for the gruesome murder of a journalist in Turkey — and that is also killing thousands of civilians with American-made weapons in Yemen... |
