Mediaboss Marketing

James Bovard 10:02 a.m. EDT April 10, 2015

In this March 14, 2015 file photo, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker speaks at a training workshop for the New Hampshire state Republican Party in the auditorium at Concord High School in Concord, N.H. Walker is facing criticism for seeming to change his stance on certain issues to court political favor ahead of the GOP presidential primaries.(Photo: Jim Cole, AP)

Governor Scott Walker has soared to the front of Republican presidential candidates thanks largely to his reputation for fighting wasteful government spending in Wisconsin. Republican faithful across the nation envision Walker as the great hope to finally end Washington budget shenanigans. But a tangled, tawdry stadium subsidy deal Walker is championing raises questions about whether the Wisconsin governor is ready to play in the Big League.

Gov. Walker last month asked the Wisconsin legislature to provide $220 million in funding for a new stadium for the Milwaukee Bucks basketball team. Walker claims that his proposal relies on a "common-sense, fiscally conservative approach" that is carefully structured to avoid gouging Wisconsinites: "There's absolute security for the taxpayers. No new taxes, no drawing on existing revenues, no exposure to the future."

But the stadium subsidy, which Walker labels "Pay Your Way," relies on an accounting gimmick pretending to earmark the future tax payments of NBA players to cover the costs of the tax-free bonds to finance the stadium. Republican Wisconsin Rep. Chris Kapenga said, "The governor's proposal would divert these increased tax dollars, which are included in future revenue projections... to the owners of the Bucks to help fund the Milwaukee arena." Nor is there any reason to presume that government outlays will not soar in the following years. As the Manhattan Institute's Steven Malanga warns about stadium subsidies: "If you build it for them, they will fleece you."

USA TODAY

Is Gov. Scott Walker ready for prime time? Our view

Walker claims that bankrolling a new arena "will preserve and potentially expand jobs and economic growth related to the facility." (The Bucks owners have threatened to pull out of Milwaukee unless they get receive the stadium equivalent of a king's ransom.) But a government injection of capital into a basketball venue will not magically revive Milwaukee's prosperity. Economist Dennis Coates, in a study for the conservative American Enterprise Institute, warns that the presence of professional sports teams "may actually reduce local incomes... Wages and employment in the retail and services sectors have dropped [in many local economies] because of professional sports." Howard Gleckman of the liberal Urban Institute also concludes that "there is no evidence that professional sports stadiums do anything to increase economic development."

Walker's stadium pitch is strongly opposed by the liberal group One Wisconsin Now and by the Wisconsin Conservative Digest, whose editor, Bob Dohnal scoffs: "All these claims about development and improving the economy are all just baloney."

Stadium socialism is crony capitalism at its worst. A Bloomberg News analysis concluded that subsidies for sports structures have cost taxpayers $4 billion in recent decades. Professional sports team owners tend to be the among the richest 1% of the richest 1%.

Read more from the original source:
Scott Walker's stadium socialism: Column