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Other People's Money
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As San Diego voters prepare to decide whether to be suckers... er, give the Chargers a stadium deal, it's instructive to look at how that's turned out elsewhere, as in Santa Clara, where the city is just now realizing that tax money may have illegally been used to pay for things the 49ers were supposed to pay for at Levi's Stadium, including reseeding that awful field. Stadium spending is one of the all-time disconnects between reality and emotion; economists are unanimous that stadiums and arenas don't create much development or many jobs that are beneficial to the region, they just displace dollars that would have gone elsewhere. And when they say "it's just a hotel tax on visitors," it's known that, inevitably, locals end up paying no matter how the plan is worded, because it does affect things like both individual and convention travel which gets deflected elsewhere and because the money from that tax is money that could be put to better use (for education and infrastructure, for a couple of examples) than a stadium of limited use. Yet when the local team threatens to move, otherwise rational people campaign to hand the team owners -- billionaires all -- wads of cash. Stupid. (KNTV/San Jose-San Francisco)
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