It’s an open scam. It’s been happening for decades. Billionaires demand taxpayers pay for their stadiums, or they’re taking the team and they’re moving to a different city. And politicians are there to facilitate the entire transaction. This just happened with the Buffalo Bills and the Tennessee Titans, and now more sports teams are threatening to move.
Unless they get public funding, those teams include the Jacksonville Jaguars, the Milwaukee Brewers, the Tampa Bay Rays, the Kansas City Royals, the Arizona Coyotes, the Calgary Flames, and the Oklahoma City Thunder. And the pitch is always the same. Don’t worry. Once the stadium is here, this will create jobs and then the economic activity activities surrounding the team will spur economic growth in the community.
This is never the case. It never works out for the public. It’s always a ruse. This has been proven time and time again, and I will link to several articles that detail why the public loses in this transaction. Deadspin. com has done an excellent job covering this. So has fieldofschemes.com. So where could the money be going?
And first of all, you will be pitched on the fact that this money is coming from out of staters. This is coming from tourists, or this is coming from some other funds. It doesn’t matter because the money ultimately could go. to the citizenry. It could go to the community. So no matter how the money is raised or where it comes from, this is money that’s being diverted from you to professional sports teams.
So where could this money go? It could go to education. So your kids could get a better education. They could have access to better technology. We could have increased teacher salaries so teacher jobs are more desirable. So better teachers, better health care. We could improve clinics. We can improve hospitals.
We can ensure there’s access to affordable quality healthcare. We can improve public transportation, buses, subways, trains, roads. We can have more affordable housing, which means less homelessness and more housing for low income. Families, we could have green spaces, we could have parks, so we could have nice things for the community and we could improve the infrastructure.
So this could be, this could go back to the roads or the bridges. We could also work with sewage systems. We could also work on community development, more public jobs at higher salaries, so they’re desirable public jobs. And we could support local small businesses. And of course we could also support. the public safety services.
So police, fire department, EMS, but no, we’re told that we need to pay for these billionaires stadiums so that they can make money off the stadiums and the public never gets a share. And by the way, the estimates and the projections are always under or over against the public. So when you hear the estimated economic impact, it’s always estimated over.
Because they want to pitch you and sell you that this is going to end up working out in the community’s favor. It’s not. And when they project the cost of the stadium, it’s going to go over. So if there are any shortfalls that aren’t accounted for, guess who pays for them? It’s always a burden on the taxpayers and the taxpayers never have control.
So as soon as the money goes, it’s all in control of these private entities, these billionaires, and they decide what happens. So the public has no say in how the stadium is used or managed. They might get some small concessions like access to the stadium a few times a year. But that’s it, despite the fact that the billionaires want the public to pay for the money, they want all the upside and none of the downside.
So it shifts, right? We, we socialize the risk and the cost and the upside all stays with the billionaire. And recently the tap, the, I mentioned the Oklahoma city thunder. Want a new stadium, they, the estimated cost of the stadium is $900 million and that’s the minimum, and the thunder will only contribute a reported $50 million.
I talked about the titans and the bills. The Titans secured $1.2 billion in public financing for a $2.1 billion stadium. Why do they need. Such a lavish stadium. The bills $850 million of the $1.5 billion cost of their stadium. These teams are not paying for their stadiums. The public is. I mentioned the politicians. What are the politicians doing here? Because usually the politicians. Are supporting this new stadium. Why are they supporting it? Especially given the obvious that we could instead of having this money supposedly flow through a private entity, and then supposedly the money comes back.
We don’t need that. We don’t need that pass through. We can give the money directly to the people. We could just lower taxes or we could offer tax rebates. But no, supposedly we just have to have this, this stadium and we have to provide a public subsidy for this stadium. Well, the politicians can stand to benefit in a number of ways.
So there’s the obvious kickbacks and bribes, but then there’s also the politician could have a personal or financial interest in the companies involved in the construction. They could receive campaign contributions.
And here’s a big one. There could be opportunities after their political career is over in the private sector. So they could take on Very well compensated consultancy roles or board positions at other employers adjacent to the stadium or adjacent to the to the ownership. And then there could also be profiteering from the land deals and the real estate profits.
The politician could also have influence over. Contract awards, and then somehow the money would flow back to them. So there’s any number of ways in which the politicians could have a conflict of interest. And one other thing here is that the stadiums have a, have a short amount of time before they all of a sudden they need new renovations.
There needs to be a new facelift on the stadium. And this is supposedly to keep pace with the modern arenas or the modern stadiums. And. Having new suites available. And so guess who ends up paying for that? It’s usually the public. Guess who ends up paying for the maintenance? It’s usually the public in any number of ways.
The public funding usually ends up creeping back or becomes another subject. Because the team owners just can’t help themselves. They want those free hundreds of millions of dollars at the cost of the community. Think about this cowboy stadium when it was originally built. Was partially publicly funded.
Think about how much money Jerry Jones has. Why does he need to take away from the community’s funding? The community that desperately needs this funding for schools and any number of the other reasons which I mentioned. And this happens over and over again, those are my notes but this is really disgusting behavior on the part of the billionaires, but it’s always dressed up and it’s made nice, and that’s where the scam is, that’s where the dishonesty is, is because they pretend like the money is going to go back to the public, but it’s never known, we don’t have hard data to show that it will, we don’t have contracts to show that it will, there’s no guarantee that the money’s coming back, but even if it did, Why not just give the money directly to the community and then have that ROI come?
Wouldn’t it be great if we had better education and better health care? Wouldn’t that improve quality of life for so many people right away? There are so many ways in which this fund funding could immediately stand to benefit the public. We can see just how far just a few hundred thousand dollars go.
Imagine if hundreds of millions of dollars flowed into the community, but no, it flows directly into billionaires pockets.