Stadium Rip-Offs

Professor Ilya Somin explains how New York City taxpayers are being fleeced to pay for a new Yankee Stadium.  And the Washington Examiner describes how the D.C. Council is planning to raise taxes on baseball tickets to defray some of the costs of the city-funded stadium for the last-place Washington Nationals.  The projected revenue stream from the team turns out to have been about as accurate as Enron’s projected earnings.  Attendance at Nationals games has fallen far short of the rosy projections that were used to justify city subsidies for the stadium’s construction.  Publicly-funded stadiums never live up to the claims of their boosters, and are always bad for the economies and taxpayers of the localities that fund them.