How dare workers expect more than $7.25 per hour! Don't count on a decent retirement or health care plan from your employer either. Fix poisonous lead pipes? Gonna have to wait. Repair potholes and crumbling bridges? Not this decade. Strengthen Social Security and Medicare? Not a chance! Maybe we should phase them out.
More money for private, billionaires' sport stadiums? No problem. There's always hundreds of millions in public dollars for private playgrounds and speculation.
Milwaukee's Miller Park (now American Family Field) baseball stadium (for the Milwaukee Brewers) opened in 2001. Total cost to taxpayers was estimated over a billion dollars. Already, twenty years later, the Brewers need nearly $300 million more from taxpayers.
The same old myth is playing out in this greed and grift saga, wrapped in the contrived cloak of economic development and jobs. As the fairy tale goes, sports have a significant economic impact, spurring other developments, and creating jobs. And, as always, there's the threat of leaving. The Brewers may find a new host city if Milwaukee and Wisconsin don't fork over the cash.
Thought experiment: Can a business (sport team) claim to be infinitely successful and astoundingly economically impactful if, every twenty years or so, said entity must bribe and blackmail to be able to afford, supposedly, needed upgrades for their place of work (the sport arena)?
Or, sadly, is that just how this blackmail song-and-dance shakes out, each and every time, in city after city? [Spoiler - yes, this is how it plays out in city after city, year after year.]
The boondoggles march on.
For Further Reading:Site Selection Shenanigans
