$750 million.
That’s how much Mark Davis and the Las Vegas Raiders want Nevada taxpayers to fork over in order to build a new 65,000-seat, $1.9 billion stadium, part of the deal to woo the team from their longtime home in Oakland.
ESPN’s Kevin Seifert crunched the numbers, and determined that taxpayers have given almost $7 billion in tax money to the NFL to help fund the building of stadiums.
So will Nevada see a big economic boost for laying so much money on the table to help keep a bunch of billionaires rich? It’s doubtful.
According to a study by the Brookings Institute, there is little evidence that new stadiums provide enough local economic benefit to pay back the hundreds of millions of dollars taxpayers forked over to build them.
“Decades of academic studies consistently find no discernible positive relationship between sports facilities and local economic development, income growth, or job creation,” the authors of the study explained in their report. “And local benefits aside, there is clearly no economic justification for federal subsidies for sports stadiums.”
And that price tag doesn’t include the cost to federal taxpayers thanks to the use of tax-exempt bonds, which teams frequently employ to finance the constriction of their stadiums.
Take the New York Yankees, who finished construction on the new Yankee Stadium in 2009. The final bill was estimated to be $2.5 billion, but of that, nearly $1.7 billion was financed by tax-exempt municipal bonds issued by New York City.
“Because the interest earned on the municipal bonds is exempt from federal taxes, a large amount of tax revenue that would have been collected—had the bonds been issued as taxable—went toward the construction of the stadium,” the authors of the report explained.
And we’re not even talking about the costs to taxpayers for things like added infrastructure, gifting city-owned land, economic opportunity grants, a waiver from anti-trust laws, subsidies from the U.S. military… the list goes on and on.
All this while the NFL is making more money than they know what to do with. SportsBusiness Daily pegged the NFL’s annual revenue at $14 billion annually.
While average people in Nevada will fork over their hard-earned money to help build the new stadium, only wealthy fans, wielding their expense-account, will be able to afford to set foot in the arena.
Where’s the revolt? – Rob Tornoe
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MAR 30, 2017 @ 09:37 PM