Taxpayers Should Never Subsidize Stadiums
There is no question that public stadium subsidies are almost always a bad investment.  However these type of articles never take into consideration that people generally like sports teams and want them to stay in the same region.  It also isn&#x27;t just people who attend the games or businesses around the stadium.  A local sports team, unlike nearly any other private business, provides a huge but unknown amount of utility to a wide range of residents who never pay for a ticket or a piece of merchandise.  Is it unreasonable for a sports team to want to benefit from that free utility?<p>Politicians shouldn&#x27;t buy all of these stupid economic arguments for a simple fact they are often wrong.  But governments aren&#x27;t businesses.  They don&#x27;t have to make the smart economic move on every single decision.  Creating a public park is rarely a smart economic move, but cities do it because that is what residents want.  Politicians who let a sports franchise leave town without putting up a fight in negotiations are often quickly voted out (as well as politicians who offer too many incentives for a team to stay).  So the people clearly want to keep teams when the cost is reasonable.  The problem is what is &quot;reasonable&quot;, especially when there is another city a few states over that has a slightly more generous definition of &quot;reasonable&quot;?<p>TL;DR - It is more complicated than &quot;sports stadiums = bad&quot; but these discussions rarely get deeper than that.