How the Super Bowl became a super boondoggle that fleeces taxpayers
Source: PandoDaily
... No single industry exemplifies Selective Deficit Disorder like sports. Detroit tells one microcosmic story. There, public officials are making a fiscal-responsibility argument in their push to slash the average municipal worker’s $19,000-a-year pension. At the same time, those officials are reassuring private professional sports franchises that massive public subsidies for a new stadium will go forward as planned.
As The Atlantic’s Gregg Easterbrook exhaustively documents, this political scheme which transfers wealth to multi-billion-dollar sports leagues has been replicated all over America. In the name of fiscal responsibility, politicians today demand cuts to public workers’ pensions, education and basic government services. They then turn right around and throw cash at already-lucrative sports industries.
... Out of all the sports enterprises benefiting from this pillage, none has more deftly exploited Selective Deficit Disorder than the National Football League.
During this era of budget austerity, Bloomberg News reports that pro football teams have raked in $18.5 billion in stadium subsidies, or more than $900 million a year over the last 20 years. And that’s on top of all the other special tax breaks that allow the $9-billion-a-year league to avoid paying the taxes that other businesses (are supposed to) pay.
Read more: http://pando.com/2014/01/31/how-the-super-bowl-became-a-super-boondoggle-that-fleeces-taxpayers/
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