Shoddy Architecture

Major League Baseball has, somehow, avoided the embarrassment of the Montreal Expos over the past few years. No other major sports league could get away with owning one of its teams for as long as MLB has owned the Expos. The conflict of interest alone, should have launched a thousand columns about how this was one step short of the WWF. How can you trust trades when both trading partners have the same ownership? Even better, how can you trust trades when one of the partners could have the trade rejected by a third, supposedly unrelated party? How can the players trust that team to seriously bid for free agents? This is a conflict that must end.

Well, MLB was on the way to clearing this conflict with a move of the Expos to Washington D.C. Fine. Go right ahead. Oh, but the city suggests that the team pay for 50% of its stadium. That’s right, come and you will build half of it.

Sorry, says MLB. We don’t want to pay that much. Hell, we don’t want to pay for any of it.

Stadium finance is welfare, plain and simple. And it’s welfare for millionaires. It is the subsidization of a medium sized business at taxpayer expense. Sports teams don’t generate as much revenue as many other businesses in the areas in which they operate. They don’t employ that many people relative to the revenues they generate. The highest paid employees, the ones who would create a "trickle down" effect generally don’t live where the team is located. This deprives an area of their personal spending and the municipality of taxes. Sports teams also compete for a finite amount of entertainment dollars with movie theaters, bowling alleys, restaurants, plays, museums, and other forms of entertainment. A new stadium for a team can even have a net negative effect on a city if the stadium is financed with taxes on other entertainments (like the way Solider Field was financed).

I hope MLB gets hosed on this. They deserve it. The taxpayers in Washington don't deserve it. And how ironic would it be that baseball blows it in D.C. over stadium finance when the man down the street living in 1600 Pennsylvania made all his money from a taxpayer-welfare financed ballpark in Texas?

For more on stadium finance, see:
Field of Schemes
Sports, Jobs, and Taxes: The Economic Impact of Sports Teams and Stadiums

:::UPDATE:::
Jim Caple at ESPN.com writes the same basic thing today, although much better than I did. And his conclusion also features George Bush and the taxpayer supported return on his investment - 1667%. Yes, nearly 17 times his original investment. Must be nice to make money off the backs of the public.