Tax dollars for stadiums: A losing game
Breaking news: Your hometown team will get a fancy, shiny new stadium! The even better news: The team owners will not spend much on it. Taxpayers, both fans and non-fans alike, foot the bill and give away hundreds of millions of hard-earned tax dollars straight to your team owner’s pocket!
Americans are familiar with this story: a team wants a new stadium, threatens to leave the city if they don’t get public money, and gets a hefty subsidy out of the ordeal. After the deal is signed, politicians and team owners do a victory lap, pat themselves on the back, and tell the public the money is a good investment—they are always wrong.
Studies conclusively show subsidies create little to no new jobs and open gaping wounds to public finances. The fancy new stadiums might be a good deal for the teams and politicians who voted for the funding, but they are a terrible deal for taxpayers. Yet cities keep approving millions of dollars to subsidize stadiums.
The money is nothing to scoff at. Here are just some of the most outrageous subsidies or proposed subsidies over the last few years:
- Nashville citizens will pay $1.2 billion to pay for the Titans new $2.1 billion domed stadium
- New Yorkers will pay $850 million to fund the Bills’ new stadium
- Las Vegas disbursed $750 million in subsidies to get the Raiders to move and build their new stadium.
- Atlanta residents paid $700 million to build a fancy new stadium for the Falcons.
- The District of Columbia passed a $515 million subsidy to prevent the Capitals and the Wizards from leaving the city.
- Cleveland is debating whether to give away $1 billion or $500 million to rebuild or refurnish the Browns’ stadium.
All of these teams are valued in the billions of dollars and have hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue each year. They are more than equipped to pay for their own stadiums without the public footing the bill.
City and state governments don’t have unlimited money, nor do they have a lack of problems to tend to. Yet, they decide to spend our taxpayer dollars on white elephant projects that bring little to no economic benefit to their cities while lining the pockets of sports team owners.
It’s time to stop that. Politicians should not use Americans’ passion for sports as an excuse to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on projects that bring no benefit to the public.
