In his budget proposal for the forthcoming fiscal year, President Obama floated a proposal to eliminate the use of tax-free government bonds for the financing of sports stadiums or arenas. Given the lumpish behavior of the trolls of Congress over anything proposed by the president, it's pretty unlikely the proposal will ever see the light of day. Nonetheless, it's an interesting proposal to see at a time when public frustration over sports stadia expenditures is closer to boiling than it has been in many years.
It's not hard to find pretty grotesque examples of ludicrous amounts of public money being lavished on the fields in which teams owned by the 0.0001% play. Marlins Park in Miami is probably the gold standard for most recent stadium financial obscenity, a case in which notorious tightwad Jeffrey Loria basically got handed the keys to a crazily expensive monument to a team that has sandwiched a whole bunch of losing seasons around two of the flukiest World Series titles ever won. In forthcoming stadium spending, the impending move of the Atlanta Braves to a new park in Cobb County, leaving behind a former Olympic Stadium that will barely be twenty years old at their departure, has caused a bit of carping from this blog and other sources, although not all the issues in that case (at least for me) are necessarily about public financing of the stadium. Stadium deals for the Minnesota Vikings, San Francisco 49ers, Seattle Seahawks and other teams resulted in massive transfer of public funds into the pockets of people who already have plenty of money. It doesn't just extend to stadiums proper; the now-convicted-of-corruption former governor of Virginia gave a boatload of public money to the Washington Racist-Mascot-Not-Protected-By-Copyrights to put a summer training facility in Richmond, for example.
As the Slate article linked above notes, this isn't the first time Congress or the executive branch have tried to thwart such money giveaways; perversely, those attempts only seemed to encourage even more stadium giveaways. So perhaps a direct ban is the equivalent of a last-ditch attempt to curb the excesses of public financing for stadiums. Something tells me, though, that states or municipalities won't take kindly to being told by Big Gummint evildoers in Washington how they can and can't give away public money.
For the moment, I am actually withholding an opinion, mostly because I have an active and virulent allergy to even the possibility of agreeing with the Koch brothers on any subject (read down a little ways to see what I mean). I do think there are a couple of points that need to be made in relation to the subject, here on the direct relationship of such spending and civic responsibility on the part of the mindful faithful fan. Specifically, to raise your voice in opposition to public spending on sports facilities, you morally obligate yourself to be equally vociferous on two highly related subjects.
One: if you're going to get agitated on this subject you are morally obligated to get equally agitated on other giveaways of public funds for corporations that don't involve sports teams. Here I am speaking of the gobs of tax breaks and other financial giveaways used to lure things like automobile building facilities or other presumed "jobs deals." There are a couple of reasons for this; (1) the job-bringing capabilities of these deals are more mythological than real. Expecting that the bulk of the jobs in such giveaways to be filled locally is about as wise as expecting the entire lineup of the team playing in your city's stadium to be made up of folks actually from that city; and (2) the giveaways combined with the exaggerated job effect render the newly-lured factor a net revenue loser for your municipality. You've given a rich guy a big gift to very much the same degree that Miami or Minnesota did for the Marlins or Vikings, with virtually nothing coming back to you and/or your city.
Two: you are obligated to be proactive about how those dollars that don't go to the sports owner are spent, up to and including punishing politicians not just for sports giveaways but for all of their financial sins. One of the most often-cited reasons for opposing stadium giveaways has been the claim that such giveaways "took away" money that should have been going to education, or poverty alleviation, or (insert your pet cause here). It sounds very noble, and often gives the person making the argument a sheen of moral superiority. The trouble is it's seldom actually true. In most cases the monies in question never were going to education or poverty or whatever in the first place. In other cases, as with the Wisconsin story above, the funds were going to be cut anyway. Scott Walker didn't cut education funding in Wisconsin to give money away to the Milwaukee Bucks; he cut education funding because he's a hateful jackass who thinks any education beyond high school is an elitist scam. If you haven't already been creating whatever civic unrest is necessary to get that money into education before your governor or mayor wants to redirect it to the NFL or MLB or NBA, that's on you.
And yes, I do mean civic unrest if that's what it takes. These clowns give away such monies because on some level they believe their careers or their futures depend on doing so; if you don't make their lives miserable they'll never believe otherwise.
Got it?
Marlins Park under construction, 2011; crazy amounts of public money involved
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