Political Class Greed - Texas Style

Today let's travel out of DC down to Texas and see that even local members of the political class can waste taxpayer money. The NFL's Dallas Cowboys just opened a brand new football stadium in Arlington, Texas. It costs about $1.2 billion and a Sports Illustrated article in their September 28, 2009 issue reported the following facts after the stadium's initial game between the Giants and the Cowboys:

• The stadium is the largest column free structure in the world.
• It can accommodate over 100,000 spectators, the largest NFL stadium ever built.
• The facility of the NFL's Detroit Lions, Ford Field in Detroit, could fit inside the new Cowboy stadium.
• Single game ticket prices for the Cowboys games average $159 per ticket, the highest priced seats in the entire league.
• Beer costs $8 a glass and hamburgers cost $13 a piece.
• Parking is $75 per game.
• Some of the better seats in the stadium required customers to pay $150,000 up front for a seat license BEFORE paying for any game tickets.
• Opening game attendees included, but were not limited to, LeBron James, Rudy Giuliani, John Madden, and George W. Bush.

Very, very impressive. However, the most impressive number is that the local politicians kicked in $325 million dollars of local taxpayer money to help fund the entire construction. Since there are about 1.3 million people living in the Dallas/Fort Worth/Arlington market, each person contributed about $250 to the construction, with a family of four contributing about $1,000.

To add insult to injury, the vast majority of these people will never get to see a game inside of the stadium since they cannot afford to, i.e. the local politicians took money from working families and gave it to a very rich man, Cowboy owner Jerry Jones, who can now watch very rich football players play football in front of very rich people. Between tickets, parking expenses, food and beverages, you could very easily see a family of four spending in excess of $800 to attend ONE game. This is not going to happen very often. However, I would bet that politicians are going to get in quite often.

All such corporate welfare projects such as this one should never occur. If Jerry Jones and the NFL want to build a $1.2 billion palace, they should pay for all of it, no taxpayer money should ever be spent like this. My preference would have been for the local taxpayers to keep their $1,000 since they will rarely, if ever, get the joy of seeing their investment in person. However, another metric that is of interest is education. If you assume that the average Arlington teacher makes about $45,000 a year, that $325 million could have funded the salaries of about 722 additional teachers for the next ten years. You tell me, what would have been a better investment:

1. Give rich people taxpayer money like the political class did?
2. Return an average of $1,000 to a typical family and let the Cowboys "settle" for an $900 million palace?
3. Keep the money and fund over 700 new teacher positions?

Politicans are the same all over, they think they own the money we pay in taxes and can spent it as they see fit. However, if we learned anything over the past few days' posts, they usually waste it. Thus, the first step in "Love My Country, Loathe My Government", reducing government's size by 50% over the next five years is critical to eliminate waste and corporate welfare such as this.

The only good news out of the article was that my Giants want the game!