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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24531 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026

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Most stadium deals are something like "the government spends 1 gazillion dollars building it and then leases it to the local sports team for $1 a year".

Source

Until the early 1950s, most professional sports stadiums were privately built. That changed in 1953 when the Boston Braves were lured to Milwaukee by a new stadium built with public money. Since then, public funding of stadiums has been the norm.

We examine the size of the subsidy and the federal tax expenditure for all professional sports stadiums newly constructed, majorly renovated, or currently under construction in the United States since the year 2000 for the four largest American sports leagues: Major League Baseball (MLB), the National Football League (NFL), the National Basketball Association (NBA), and the National Hockey League (NHL). Of the 45 stadiums that fit this description, 36 of them were funded, at least in part, with federal tax expenditures in the form of tax-exempt municipal bonds. We estimate that the total tax-exempt bond principal issued to fund these stadiums [i. e., spent by municipal govts.] was approximately $13.0 billion, the present value subsidy to the bond issuers was $3.2 billion (assuming a 3 percent discount rate) or $2.6 billion (assuming a 5 percent discount rate), and the present value federal tax revenue loss was $3.7 billion (3 percent discount rate) or $3.0 billion (5 percent discount rate), with all terms in 2014 dollars. We conclude the paper with suggested reforms to reduce or eliminate this inefficient subsidy for local sports stadiums.

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