Thursday, February 3, 2011

Superdebt!

With the Super Bowl (Go Pack!) coming up on Sunday, what better time to take another blast at the taxpayers getting reamed in stadium funding deals (sorry Art!). If you follow football at all, you are already aware of Jerry Jones $1.2B monument to his giant ego, funded with $350M of taxpayer money (and that's just the explicit part). You can be sure they won't mention what a bad deal taxpayer funding has turned out to be for those poor schmucks called taxpayers, as the sports media tends to be big cheerleaders for this kind of financial rape.

Thank goodness for Mark Yost's story in the WSJ that discusses how taxpayers are constantly shafted (my words....the WSJ would never use such language!). It has a particularly nice list of debts still owed on facilities that have been torn down, such as the old Giants Stadium and the Astrodome. He even suggests that the Tea Party should be raging against taxpayer funded facilities.

I recently read "Field of Schemes" by Neil deMause and Joanna Cagan, a somewhat dated book (published almost 10 years ago) tale of how stadiums conned fans into new stadiums. Thanks to Yost's article, I discoverd that deMause also has a blog by that name, which I have today added to my list of Fun Eco Blogs on the right.

Good advice: Just vote "NO!!".

1 comment:

Unknown said...

On top of the insane amount of money taxpayers give to the world of football, the super bowl host committee is asking for *donations*. Not monetary - they want people to knit scarves for their volunteers. For free. http://www.journalgazette.net/article/20100921/BLOGS26/100929975

I've heard of charity knitting. I've made hats for preemies and blankets for the homeless. I've never donated knits to an event for which people have paid upwards of $3,000 per ticket.

You'd think they could afford to use one of their NFL/clothing tie-in deals if they really cared about the volunteers staying warm!