Here’s how to know, with absolute certainty, that you are an old person: You remember when liberals despised corporate welfare.
It’s pathetic enough that “progressives” enthusiastically back subsidies to Hollywood (and its unions), “green” energy, and “transit-oriented development.” But increasingly, the left has walked away from the righteous rejection of giveaways to professional sports.
Exhibit 237R: New York and the Buffalo Bills. Seven months ago, the corrupt, unelected governor of the Empire State announced “an unprecedented $850 million in public money” for a “brand-new $1.4 billion stadium.” The pigskin palace — it will be “state of the art” and “have a great deal of modern amenities that we currently lack at Highmark Stadium” — is to be built right across the street from the existing dump.
Is the huge handout “needed”? You make the call — the owner of the Bills, Terry Pegula, has a net worth of $6.7 billion.
Kathy Hochul works ‘round-the-clock, “creating good-paying jobs and putting working families first.” And Erie County Legislator April N. McCants-Baskin, a vocal stadium supporter, is a “devoted community advocate on behalf of equity and social justice.” The ladies have an odd way of reconciling principles and action. However, it’s a mistake to assume that Buffalo’s imminent anti-taxpayer atrocity is solely the result of political opportunism. A statewide poll released at the time of Hochul’s blockbuster reveal found that a majority of self-described liberals were either for the stadium, or “unsure.”
Vexingly, sports chicanery is perpetrated by Team Red, too. Earlier this month, “Nashville and Davidson County Mayor John Cooper and the Tennessee Titans announced they have agreed to terms for a new enclosed stadium.” A “mix of private contributions and state and local revenue bonds” will cover the “potential $2.1 billion deal.” Cooper is a Democrat, but the legislature, which “dedicated $500 million in one-time bonds to the project,” is under the control of the GOP. Governor Bill Lee, who signed the largesse authorization into law, is a Republican.
The Titans’ “community benefits platform” includes “multi-faceted programs that reach many of Nashville’s most underserved communities with a focus on three areas — Opportunity, Neighborhoods, and Education.” That’s enough to buy the acquiescence of both the Urban League of Middle Tennessee and Nashville’s government-school bureaucracy. But the Beacon Center of Tennessee, which produces “expert empirical research and timely free market solutions,” isn’t convinced. Mark Cunningham, the think tank’s vice president of strategy and communications, considers it “hard to imagine a proposal more out of touch with the public and the needs of the city,” and urges “Metro Nashville Government to get back to the basics and focus on things that actually matter to the people they serve.”
The center’s assessment is aligned with decades of reputable, pan-ideological research. As far back as 1990, in an analysis of “over a dozen” teams that benefited from “municipal subsidy,” the Heartland Institute concluded that when fixed costs — e.g., “debt service and foregone property taxes” — were accounted for, every government-owned stadium examined “generated a net loss of wealth to the city’s taxpayers.” In 2001, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City economists found the claim that “increased economic activity and increased tax revenue collection exceed … public outlays” for sports facilities unconvincing, and noted that “independent … studies universally find such benefits to be much smaller than claimed.” In 2016, the Brookings Institution wrote that the “evidence for large spillover gains from stadiums to the local economy is weak,” with research “consistently find no discernible positive relationship between … construction and local economic development, income growth, or job creation.” Three years later, Victor Matheson, an economist at the College of the Holy Cross, disparaged “the privately funded consulting reports that frequently accompany stadium proposals, and which invariably tout large economic benefits from subsidized stadiums and arenas” — they “have been shown to suffer from significant theoretical flaws that make their conclusions suspect at best, and simply false at worst.” Just last year, George Mason University’s Michael D. Farren And Matthew D. Mitchell counseled that it was better for cities to “compete by creating the best environments in which to live, work and innovate than by coughing up taxpayer dollars.”
But in the battle between solid policy/economic scrutiny and empty-headed civic boosterism, the latter usually prevails. It almost certainly will in Buffalo and Nashville.
Not so very long ago, the left could be relied on to fiercely fight freebies for millionaires and billionaires. No more. A single mom waiting tables to barely keep the landlord at bay is no match for a woke plutocrat. Has anyone told Ralph Nader?
Surprisingly, the Albuquerque - Isotopes Park model was not too bad. After the Duke's left for Tacoma , Mayor Jim Baca got the Canadian team to pay for half the stadium renovations, sign a long term lease and move here.