When I stopped at a small airport in the middle of nowhere, Oklahoma, recently they were displaying an interesting league table of local airports ranked in order of contribution to the local economy. Obviously there are any number of ways of arriving at such figures, but it was striking that even the smallest brought in tens of thousands of dollars a year, and the medium sized ones were deemed to be generating millions. None of them service commercial flights: it is all GA. And all were benefitting their local communities.
Contrast that with small UK aerodromes struggling to make ends meet, and medium sized municipal airports trying to squeeze out unprofitable GA.
I wonder why we can't learn a thing or two from the Americans and make GA a wealth-generating industry rather than just a private foible for the few.