ADDITIONAL READING
ADDITIONAL READING
More on forcing taxpayers to pay for arenas in which grown men play boys' games so plutocrats can profit...
Investigative reporter Rodric Hurdle- Bradford has written a carefully reported and thoroughly sourced article on the fiscal pitfalls and corrupt stink of publicly funded sports stadiums.
The analysis was written by Raymond J. Keating, chief economist for the Small Business Survival Committee. If tax-funded stadiums were good for small businesses and entrepreneurship, Keating would be the first to say so...
Rodric has a long history of intellectual muscle backing him up... It’s not a partisan issue... Or a new issue either. Twenty years ago, the
He doesn't. He cites the inelasticity of supply-side leisure dollars, the dubious argument that expenditure of these leisure dollars in a concentrated area around a sports stadium (what
Who shall doubt “the secret hid Under Cheops’ pyramid” Was that the contractor did Cheops out of several millions?
Rudyard Kipling
liberal-leaning Brookings Institution published the seminal Sports, Jobs, and Taxes: The Economic Impact of Sports Teams and Stadiums . The book was edited by Stanford University economics professor Roger Noll and Smith College economics professor Andrew Zimbalist. They concluded: A new sports facility has an extremely small (perhaps even negative) effect on overall economic activity and employment. No recent facility appears to have earned anything approaching a reasonable return on investment. No recent facility has been self-financing in terms of its impact on net tax revenues. The preeminent libertarian think tank, Cato Institute, has been fighting this pillage of the citizenry’s pockets since its landmark 1999 Policy Analysis, “ Sports Pork – The Costly Relationship between Major League Sports and Government .”
we'd call "bars") will have some unmeasurable "multiplier effect" (drunken spending sprees?) on the local economy, the (very measurable) adverse results of higher taxes, and the inefficiency of government spending to argue: ... the presence of stadiums, arenas, and sports teams show no positive economic impact from professional sports – or a possible negative effect. But the Brookings book and the Cato whitepaper were written years ago. Have things changed? We consulted David Boaz, executive vice president of Cato Institute. David had an answer – “No.” He referred us to a 2004 Cato Briefing Paper, “ Caught Stealing: Debunking the Economic Case for D.C. Baseball ,” written by University of Maryland economics professor Dennis Coates and Brad R. Humphreys, professor in the Department of Recreation, Sport, and Tourism at the University of Illinois.
74 | October 2017
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