Want stop the fiscal cliff from advancing? Cut welfare to sports. | SportsonEarth.com : Patrick Hruby Article
According to Harvard professor Judith Grant Long and economist Andrew Zimbalist, the average public contribution to the total capital and operating cost per sports stadium from 2000 to 2006 was between $249 and $280 million. A fantastic interactive map at Deadspin estimates that the total cost to the public of the 78 pro stadiums built or renovated between 1991 and 2004 was nearly $16 billion. Thats enough to build three Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. Or fund, in todays dollars, 15 Saturn V moon rocket launches -- three more than the number of launches in the entire Apollo/Skylab program. Its also more than what Chrysler received in the Great Recession-triggered auto industry bailout ($10.5 billion), and bigger than the 2010 GDP of 84 different nations. How does this happen? Simple. Team owners ask for public handouts and threaten to move elsewhere unless they get them, pitting cities against in each other in corporate welfare bidding wars -- wars rooted in the various publicly-granted antitrust exemptions that effectively allow sports leagues to control and maintain a limited supply of teams to be leveraged against widespread demand.
Its like this magic alchemy where we take all this public money and it morphs into private profit, says Dave Zirin, author of Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games We Love. The most egregious example of this is the Seattle Sonics going from the fourth biggest market in the country to Oklahoma City, a market that has one-eighth or one-sixteenth of the per capita income. Why did that move make sense? One place offered corporate welfare and another didnt. The NBA punished a city for not giving them hundreds of millions of dollars.
According to Harvard professor Judith Grant Long and economist Andrew Zimbalist, the average public contribution to the total capital and operating cost per sports stadium from 2000 to 2006 was between $249 and $280 million. A fantastic interactive map at Deadspin estimates that the total cost to the public of the 78 pro stadiums built or renovated between 1991 and 2004 was nearly $16 billion. Thats enough to build three Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. Or fund, in todays dollars, 15 Saturn V moon rocket launches -- three more than the number of launches in the entire Apollo/Skylab program. Its also more than what Chrysler received in the Great Recession-triggered auto industry bailout ($10.5 billion), and bigger than the 2010 GDP of 84 different nations. How does this happen? Simple. Team owners ask for public handouts and threaten to move elsewhere unless they get them, pitting cities against in each other in corporate welfare bidding wars -- wars rooted in the various publicly-granted antitrust exemptions that effectively allow sports leagues to control and maintain a limited supply of teams to be leveraged against widespread demand.
Its like this magic alchemy where we take all this public money and it morphs into private profit, says Dave Zirin, author of Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games We Love. The most egregious example of this is the Seattle Sonics going from the fourth biggest market in the country to Oklahoma City, a market that has one-eighth or one-sixteenth of the per capita income. Why did that move make sense? One place offered corporate welfare and another didnt. The NBA punished a city for not giving them hundreds of millions of dollars.
