Birdseye: Kaiser Aerospace and Electronics

Kaiser Aerospace and Electronics is a subsidary recently purchased by Rockwell Collins. Its niche in the sphere of military manufacturing is of a subcontractor designing electronics for many of the other large manufacturers. Kaiser does not directly engineer products that are quite as deadly or creepy as those manufactured by its partners, such as large missile and fighter jet systems, products with nuclear materials, or new methods of surveillance. However, its high annual income and the number of people it employs in the Silicon Valley area helps to demonstrate the degree of dependence of the San Francisco Bay area economy on cash flow from military contracts.
It is a dirty secret that a large fraction of the upper-middle class technology jobs of this area are military related. Only a few thousand people work and Google and some other well-known civlian companies. However, in aggregate, literally hundreds of thousands work at Lockheed-Martin and other giants. Thus despite the reputation of the Bay Area as being liberal on social issues, shouldn't we have to recognize that the economy of this area would literally cave in if there were ever an end to war and the federal military budget? The pool of people able to afford the $750,000 median houses in the South Bay would be far smaller without the military contractors.
We often hear a chorus of complaints and petitions whenever a military base is threatened with closure, because the economy of the rural area would be devastated without its presence. And clearly, soldiers and sailors are paid very little, in the scheme of the military. Most of the fraction of everyone's federal taxes that goes to military expenditures flows to investors in military company stocks, some large foreign expenditures for the military and CIA projects, and most significantly, to high-income military engineering jobs. If it were analogous to a courtroom, wouldn't the San Francisco area have to exempt itself as the judge or jury, given the conflict of interest?