The public buys them stadiums, and special zoning and freeway exits at public expense, which they threaten to leave idle unless they get more concessions or they will move to another town. Then they charge ever-increasing ticket prices and splash money on everyone connected. All with standard anti-trust protections for the public.
**Do major sports really need government handouts? **
No, they don’t. Nor do such handouts generally result in a net profit for the locale that indulges the sports team in question ( which is the usual excuse ).
They do. If you assume that athletes should continue to make more and more millions every year. Professional sports needs a major league smack down. It’ll never happen, but teams should be operating on a budget of about a tenth of what they currently spend, at least as far as salaries go. If all teams did this, do you really think we’d be deprived of being entertained by good athletes? Of course, not. There are not a lot of guys who would turn down $300,000 because they could make #350,000 as a dentist. I had high hopes during the baseball strike that a major shift could come about, I guess it can’t. Not when people keep going to the games and fawning over a bunch of overpaid pricks.
The owners are billionaires. They could build the stadiums themselves but why should they when the public can be convinced to do it for them . They threaten to move when someone has the nerve to think tax dollars should not be given to them.
The players could not make big salaries, if the sports did not generate billions in profits.
Ford bought the Lions in19 64 for 5 million . Forbes says they are worth 839 million now. Yes we need to have the tax payers buy them stadiums. They have trouble getting by. The public only built Ford 2 stadiums so far.
If the guardians of the public treasury see fit to build stadiums with public funds, so be it. However, the public should retain ownership, and the property should be managed in the public interest–including charging full market value for use of the facilities, retaining parking and concession revenue, etc. I figure by the time you add a couple layers of bureaucracy, the owners will find it more efficient to build their own facilities with private funding.
Major league ballclubs should pay whatever salaries the market commands them to and not a penny more or less. If the market says that a football player should make $10 million, then so be it. Where’s the problem?
However, the government absolutely shoud NOT be building them free stadiums, for exactly the same reason they don’t build most business’s buildings; because it’s not supposed to be the taxpayer’s job to fund a private business. My company has to build its own building. So can the sports team.
You’re generous. Stadium handouts NEVER result in a net profit for the locals; never. The cost is always, without exception, vastly higher than the opportunity cost of the lost money. There’s never been a serious and unbiased study of the issue ever done that did not come to the conclusion that publicly funded stadia aren’t a money sinkhole.
Screw that. If the guardians of the public treasury see fit to build stadiums with public funds, we need new guardians of the public treasury who aren’t corrupt idiots.
How many of us would be in favor of building a new symphony hall, museum, or library with public funds? Sports teams certainly seem to have a lot of cultural value to places like New York so why not support them with public funds? What’s the difference?
Odesio
Sheer expense for one. For another, sports is a business, a quite profitable one. They don’t need the money; a library or museum does. And they also are deceptive in how they go about it, pretending that the people shelling out the money will get more in return.
Because lowbrow, gladiator-esque popular entertainment is self-sustaining, haute culture is not?
because symphony halls, museums, and libraries aren’t primarily commercial ventures, whereas professional sports leagues have profit on their mind?
actually, most symphonies and operas and all don’t ask for government money. but don’t let facts get in the way of your point.
God, if ONLY museums and libraries were publicly funded even to a point that’s HALF as much as professional sports are…
If only one percent of the number of people cared about museums than care about the Red Sox, that would happen.
The people who support arts and culture financially are largely doing it with other people’s money. All hat and no cattle.
Gee, you’re right. I guess that totally invalidated what I said, didn’t it? :rolleyes: What do you think my point was? Please be specific.
I expressed the difference in my post: they’re primarily non-commercial and do not seek to appropriate their socially-derived intellectual property for monetary gain.
do you have a source to support your bullshit assertion?
the people who support arts and culture financially are the foundations and non-profs established by wealthy families, by and large, and secondarily the present-day patrons of the culture.
That’s not what I asked.
What was the point you think I was making? Because when you phrase it the way you did in the above quote (I put some sections in bold) it sounds like I have some sort of underhanded motivation. So, please, for my edification, what was the point I was making? In the future I’ll be sure to make myself clearer.
I’m a graduate assistant at a small museum. We have a shoe string budget but the city maintains the property (historic building) so that’s nice. Our staff is limited to one full time employee (director), a part time employee, a volunteer, and me (and I get paid by the university). The majority of our artifacts are donations with some of our more impressive collections being given or loaned to us by wealthy people. Nobody’s spending a great deal of tax dollars on these things it’s almost entirely funded by private donations.
Sports teams certainly seem to have a lot of cultural value to places like New York so why not support them with public funds?
if something has cultural value, it ought to be supported with public funds
muesums and all are places of cultural value (my assumption)
therefore museums ought to be supported with public funds
this isn’t the case.
you’re marrying some moral imperative (well if we fund EDIT: (removed museum, replaced with) culture, we should fund stadia) to a fiction (museums are publicly funded).
Because they don’t need it.