Any time a wealthy special interest wants the help of local politicians to pick the tax-payer’s pockets, they’ll seek to justify it by touting the wonderful economic impact their conspiracy will have on the community. The standard method is a figure out a multiplier reflecting how the stolen money will ramify through the community. Then figure out all sorts of tenuous possible impacts that the project, or the lack of it, could have on the local community. Brew it all up and put it in a glossy flier, and you have a prospectus for bilking the taxpayers.
Thus a $10 or $20 million dollar ‘gift’ to the special interest will be sold as having ultimately a $31 million impact on the economy. Wow! We get 31 million of economic activity in exchange for tolerating a theft of just $20 million? What a deal!
The unspoken assumption is, of course, that there isn’t an opportunity cost. That there aren’t programs and policies which that money could have financed that would have an even greater economic impact, or even be better used on non-economic values and priorities. Simply put, what else would $20 million buy and what could we have spent it on instead of… baseball?
This is the standard grift being run on taxpayers by supporters of spring training seeking to shake down Pima County for ‘$10 to $20 million’ in improvements to local baseball facilities. The claimed impact of the spring training is claimed to be (you guessed it) $31 million on the local economy by a recent, and despicably uncritical, piece in the Star.
In the United States, the total profit of professional sports is almost exactly equal to the amount to tax preferments and subsidies that industry receives. Since their existence as profitable enterprises depends on it, the professional sports industry has become very, very good at rent-seeking, and pedaling it to the public and their officials as a public good.
The economic benefit isn’t their only appeal, however, the mouthpieces for the baseball industry would have you believe that Tucson would be psychologically crippled if MLB leaves town, and other towns will despise us and call us names. Well, that’s not exactly what they claim, but it’s not far off.
I sure hope our Pima County Supervisors put a little more critical thought into the decision before actually forking over any taxpayer money to this purpose. They need to have a lot better reason than a sense of nostalgia for baseball, as Pima County Supervisor Ramon Valadez expresses in the article. Nor is a ‘surge’ in public interest, indicated by a 13.7% increase in attendance at spring training games, which Valadez also cites, a good reason to spend the money.
I count 29 events on the Tucson spring training schedule for 2007, if you combine double-headers into a single event. With a total attendance at all games of just over 270K (even with that ‘surge’ Valadez says we must maintain), that might equate with as few as 10K real fans regularly attending these events in Tucson. If Pima County ponied up $20 million for the facilities improvements MLB is demanding, that’s about $2,000 per fan. Good entertainment deal? For those fans, you bet! For the rest of us and for Tucson as a whole? Not so much.
What the MLB boosters don’t address, of course, is the opportunity cost of investing public money in baseball facilities while crying needs during an economic down-turn go wanting. I can think of a dozen things that money could be used for that have as much, or more, economic impact in Pima County (including just giving it away!) and dozens more that would be a better use of public funds than tarting up some facilities for fickle suitors like the MLB boys. How about you? Can you think of a better way to spend $10 to $20 million of taxpayer funds?
Buy your own goddamn stadiums, boys. They aren’t public assets, they are rich boys toys and the tools of corruption capitalists for extracting wealth from the communities that support them. You want to leave town for greener pastures? Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.