The Stadium Scam

I know I'm not the first person the write about this, but I might just be the most pissed off.  Yesterday, it was announced that the Atlanta Braves were going to leave Turner Field and start playing in a new publicly financed stadium starting in 2017.

Turner Field opened in 1997.

I have plenty of T-shirts older than Turner Field.
I have at least a few pairs of socks older than Turner Field.
Hell, I'm a little ashamed to admit this, but I bet I even have some underwear older than Turner Field.

Turner Field was a perfectly good stadium.  I don't really blame the Braves for taking the public financing ( $300 million ) to build a new ballpark, but I'm disgusted by the politicians in Cobb County Georgia who decided that spending $300 million to help billionaires build a stadium would be a good use of public money.  Cobb County is a Republican stronghold ( Cobb County gave a higher percentage of their votes to Romney than the rest of Georgia ), and during these times when Republicans are trying to cut food stamps, it is disheartening to know that almost half the country supports a political party that promotes this kind of corporate welfare.

Now, Cobb County is a relatively affluent suburban county of almost 700,000 people.  Perhaps $300 million for a stadium is a luxury they can afford.  Perhaps they are awash in cash and and have no other productive way to spend all their money.

Perhaps not.

As you can see from the link above, the Cobb County school system is experiencing budgets cuts and is laying off teachers.

Let me repeat that again: Cobb County decided to spend $300 million dollars on a baseball stadium while they lay off teachers.  Of course they're laying off teachers.  If there's one thing every Republican politician knows ( I'm looking at you Chris Christie! ), it's that there isn't a budget problem that can't be solved by giving more money to rich people while laying off greedy teachers.

As bad as this looks, it's worse than it looks.

The reason the Braves ( and every other professional sports team ) want a new stadium can be summed up in two words: Luxury Boxes

The Braves want to build a stadium with plenty of luxury boxes.  They want to charge ridiculously high prices to use these boxes, prices that no sane person would pay, unless ...

- the "person" is a corporation ( "Corporations are people, my friend." ).

- the "person" can write off the cost of the luxury box as a business expense.

So, not only is corporate welfare being used to finance this stadium, the stadium itself will be a corporate welfare machine that will use public money ( in the form of tax breaks ) to subsidize the price of tickets for the wealthy.

All of this is nothing new, but this Braves stadium deal is more egregious than most, and it's getting a lot more attention than these stories usually do.  Part of me hopes that this will be somewhat of an emperor-has-no-clothes momenr for the publicly-financed stadium movement.  I'm hoping that some people will finally realize that it is not a good idea to re-elect the politicians who make these kind of deals.

Of course, I'm probably giving voters too much credit, but if we can find some politicians who can make effective arguments against corporate welfare, perhaps we can make some progress as a society.

Anyway, I not even sure what to say anymore.  The only thing in my head right now is ...

Warren 2016!

Seriously, Warren 2016!

Rich