Two junior senators are reaching across the aisle in an attempt to stop taxpayer-funded stadiums for professional sports teams. Could it work?
It is an open secret in professional sports in the United States that if you—likely a billionaire or executive heading a group of billionaires—would like to both inhabit a shiny new stadium as well as spend a minimal amount of your own money to do so, the U.S. taxpayer is your best friend.
Now it would seem, according to ESPN’s Darren Rovell, there is a renewed effort in the U.S. Congress to put a halt to Joe and Jane Sixpack financing largely private construction endeavors.
"Cory Booker, D-N.J., and James Lankford, R-Okla., are sponsoring a bill that would prohibit teams from using municipal bonds, whose interest is exempt from federal taxes, to help finance stadium construction.“Professional sports teams generate billions of dollars in revenue,” Booker said in a statement. “There’s no reason why we should give these multimillion-dollar businesses a federal tax break to build new stadiums. It’s not fair to finance these expensive projects on the backs of taxpayers, especially when wealthy teams end up reaping most of the benefits.”"
Both senators, Booker and Lankford, are by Senate standards fresh meat: Both gentlemen are more than 10 years younger than the average age of Senators in the 114th Congress, and only one, Booker, is on his second term.
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However, neither Senator will be seeking re-election until the next United States Congress begins in 2019, which diminishes the likelihood that this bipartisan bill is a mechanism to curry favor with constituents.
Major League Baseball reported earnings of nearly $10 billion in 2016, not counting team-specific profits from sponsorships, licensing and television network deals. Including all of those things, the league as a whole generates revenue well north of $10 billion a year. Yet the Atlanta Braves just opened their new SunTrust Park with almost $400 million worth of assistance from taxpayers. The Oakland Athletics and Tampa Bay Rays have also made noise to local governments about wanting public funds for new digs.
Time will tell if the two senators have the clout to push such a bill through their house of Congress—they likely do not—but this is a growing indication that the public, rightly, doesn’t want to be funding the playgrounds of billionaires for much longer.