Who REALLY Pays for Big Stadiums?

Who pays and who wins in big stadium deals? The Washington commanders, it's a US style football team, will return to DC in 2030 with a brand new $3.7 billion stadium. But 1 billion of that comes directly from taxpayers. The sun reports the project will be funded mostly by private money, but citizens are still covering nearly a third of the bill. The economics just don't add up. Owner Josh Harris. Harris is worth about $11 billion. He'll see his franchi soar. He'll get richer. Average NFL players already earned more than $3 million a year. Meanwhile, residents of D.C. inherit long term debt. Politicians often justify subsidies by claiming stadiums pay for themselves, but recent examples show otherwise. Buffalo's $1.4 billion bill stadium relies on $850 million in public money, the largest taxpayer subsidy in NFL he history. Las Vegas. Las Vegas's Allegiant Stadium cost $750 million in hotel tax dollars. Economists say those funds could have fueled broader growth. The winners are clear billionaire owners and millionaire athletes. The losers are taxpayers who finance luxury boxes instead of schools, housing and transit. Okay, what's the real message here? Taking a billion dollars of tax money out of the pockets of people who live in Washington D.C. to build a football stadium so that a guy worth $11 billion gets even richer is obscene. It's absurd and it's nest. And it shows once again. The second you mention sports to people, their brains explode and they just sort of start going, oh, sports good. Anything sports good. Here, take a billion. Take, take all of our money. If we have to shut down every school, every. We have to close every road, shut down every hospital, it's okay. We love sports. That is the attitude that people have. Let's go a little bit deeper here. This has been a pet peeve of mine for a long time, as you might have deduced. Here's the question I've never had any honest person answer who is a fan of public subsidy. What is the worst thing that would happen if across America taxpayers just didn't subsidize any football, basketball or baseball stadium? What's the worst thing that would happen? How many horrible things would happen to the world? I think the only honest answer is nothing. Maybe stadiums wouldn't be built as often. Maybe they'd be a lot more efficient. Maybe these billionaire owners, instead of making $3 billion when they sell their company, their sports team, they only make $2 billion because they had to spend a billion creating their own office. To me, this is just a classic example of how people say, oh, take care of the little guy, you know, don't give to the, to the rich guy. Let's have more equality in our society. And yet this is phenomenally creating more inequality. You're making billionaires richer, you're making multimillionaires richer, and the average person gets nothing. Now, if you happen to believe people like watching football and they do, that's indisputable. It has, it can make plenty of money on its own. It can actually make plenty of money on its own. It doesn't need government taxpayers building the office. Now, you can make fun of Bill Gates and attack him all you want. Bill Gates wants to start a big office complex somewhere. He doesn't say, well, I'm absolutely not coming unless the taxpayers build the entire building. And yes, I do understand that some big companies do throw their clout around and ask for all sorts of tax refunds, rebates, but this is, this is rebates on steroids. This is absolutely obscene. Where, because there's nothing essential about. First of all, these, these businesses don't even create that many jobs when they build the stadiums. It's, it's temporary work. It's, it doesn't really create long term economic benefits. And everyone always likes to say, oh, there's the ultimate economic multiplier. Someone goes to the game, they go to dinner before, after, and they spend that money. Well, they're going to go to dinner anyway. There's no proof that they would not have spent money in that community without the stadium being there. Now, I see this time and time again where these big sports team owners play one city off to another. You better build me a big stadium. Give me a billion dollars or I'm going to go to this other city over here and let them bribe me more. And city commissioners and county commissioners and mayors. Oh, oh, don't do that. I don't want to be the one who lost our team. And here, here's a, here's money, here's more money. Here, here's a blank check, Mr. Billionaire. Write anything you want. We'll give it. Just don't leave our city, please. And then they spend billions of dollars and amortize it over 30 years. And about 12 years later, they say, you know what? We're going to leave your city because Las Vegas or some other city, they now have a stadium where the skyboxes are plated with gold and it's got the state of the art multimillion dollars of technology in every luxury owner box. And if you don't give us the same thing we're leaving. So let's tear down the stadium. You just built us 12 years ago. And now instead of giving me a billion dollars, give me three or four or five billion dollars. I mean, that's essentially the business proposition that these billionaire sports team owners are doing. I understand why they do it. What I don't understand is why seemingly sane elected officials and taxpayers put up for this. Because again, if, if you. A lot of things in life, if you say, okay, we're never going to spend any more money on highways, it would have a demonstrably negative effect on our society. Commerce would grind to a halt. If we said we don't ever want to spend any tax dollars for professional sports teams, they would still exist because there marketplace demand for their services, for their entertainment. People like going to games, they would still go to games. If you're telling me with the hundreds of billions of dollars that flow into the NFL, if they didn't have the subsidies from taxpayers, they would just say, well, you know, forget these hundreds of billions of dollars. If they're not going to build our office place, we're not going to do this. We'll just shut it down. We'll just close the business of. No, they wouldn't do that. They would figure out how to pay for it themselves. They would make slightly less profits. And if that means the average football player makes two and a half billion dollars instead of $3 million, the world wouldn't come to an end. They'd still be willing to play for that. If that means the superstars, instead of getting $300 million pay packages, have to settle for $250 million pay packages, they would still show up for work. They would still be able to build. Steve, they might not have as many gilded luxury box. It might reduce the overall profitability on these businesses. It might make them not quite as attractive when they go to sell them. So what? We would now have all of that money in communities to actually build better schools. Now, one of the arguments I hear time and time again is, well, T.J. you know, these things do many things beyond economics. They give a community pride. It gives people. You know what I've never seen the citizens of Greenwich, Connecticut, and I know a lot of them, I've never heard them say, oh gosh, aren't we a poor pathetic town? We don't have our own professional football team. We don't have our own basketball arena. We don't have our own baseball stadium. Wow, Greenwich, Connecticut is just an awful. No, no one's ever heard them say that. They, they like their town because it's a beautiful town and it has great public schools, although a lot of the kids go to private schools because they're so wealthy. You know what gives people pride in a community? Actually having clean streets, actually having excellent schools, having great universities. Those are things that you can get a return on investment on. When public spends its money getting homeless off the street, giving people treatment who are in trouble, creating a high quality of life, that's what gives a community pride. You don't need these professional sports teams becoming these giant welfare queen, and that's what they are. And the irony, of course, is so many of these sports team owners think of themselves as rugged individualists and, you know, free market guys, and they're typically guys. And yet there they are at the trough, their hand is out, there's their, their snorts are out, and they're just sucking in billions of dollars. Meanwhile, they went, how dare this person on snap, you know, food stamps is buying a Coke with my tax money. Meanwhile, they're getting a billion dollars. That pretty much goes right to their bottom line because otherwise they'd have to build their own stadiums. It is an absolute unmitigated obscenity in America, the way we subsidize billionaire owners. And it just, it's showing a trend where at a fundamental level, we don't really believe in free market enterprise. What we believe in is if you have power, use that power to get more for yourself. You don't have the power. You, you're a sucker. Unfortunately, that is the message our society is sending. More in a moment.