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Dear John,
Billionaires have found one more way to fleece the public: sports stadiums. And if we don’t play ball, they’ll take our favorite teams away.
As our most recent video explains, wealthy sports team owners have developed a playbook to intercept billions of dollars worth of taxpayer funds to build stadiums.
Ever notice how there never seems to be enough money to build public infrastructure like mass transit lines and better schools? And yet, when a multi-billion-dollar sports team demands a new stadium, our local governments are happy to oblige.
A good example of this billionaire boondoggle is the host of the 2023 Super Bowl: State Farm Stadium.
That's where the Arizona Cardinals have played since 2006. It was finally built after the team’s owner spent years hinting that he would move the Cards out of Arizona if they didn’t get a new stadium. The blitz eventually worked, with Arizona taxpayers and the city of Glendale paying a huge chunk of the construction tab.
What happened in Arizona is unfortunately very common. Since 1990, franchises in major North American sports leagues have received upwards of $30 billion worth of taxpayer subsidies from state and local governments to build stadiums.
We are underfunding public necessities in order to funnel money to billionaires for something they could feasibly afford – and what exactly are we getting in return?
Not much.
Whenever these billionaire owners try to sell us on a shiny new stadium, they claim it will spur economic growth from which we’ll all benefit. But numerous studies have shown that this is false. It seems that the people mainly benefiting from these subsidies are the wealthy team owners themselves.
As you’ll see in our video, stadium subsidies help the rich get richer at our expense.
Know the truth.
Thanks for watching,
Robert Reich
Inequality Media
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