FORUM 2 CON BLOCKS
(A2 pro args)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
A2: Businesses will migrate
A2 Protecting against corruption with injected competition
A2 Tourism
A2: New revenue
A2: Pub subs necessary
A2: Stadium Subsides work
A2: Subs. Create jobs
A2: Boosts the Economy
A/2 Economic Sense in Subsidies
A2: Multiplier Effect
A2: Disaster Relief/Katrina
A2 Comparison of two different worlds
A2: Civic Pride
A/2 Neighborhoods benefitted
A2: Stadiums increase sex trafficking
A2 Stadiums Decrease Violence
A2: Gentrification
·A2 No Monetary Cost
A2: Environment
A2: Property value/ Eminent D
A2 Charities
A2 Ballet
A2: Businesses will migrate
1.There isn't evidence or any reason on why businesses would want to migrate because of sports
John Siegfried and Andrew Zimbalist, “The Economics of Sports Facilities and Their Communities”, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2000, Pg. 98
The part of the contention that is not plausible is the notion that businesses will relocate to the city because it becomes “big league.” Sound businesses move in search of a more qualified or less expensive labor force, a convenient location for inputs or sales, a good infrastructure, a sound fiscal environment with amenable tax policy, attractive government services, and appealing cultural opportunities. The latter may include the quality of the local theater, opera, symphony, parks, art museums, hospitals, public schools, universities or sports teams. If the first half dozen or so items are equivalent between two cities, then the business may look at cultural amenities and within them may consider sports. It does not seem plausible that the presence or absence of sports teams would be a decisive location factor for more than a few companies. There is no systematic evidence that business relocations follow sports teams.
2. Not true
Robert A Baade, “Stadiums, Professional Sports, and Economic Development: Assessing the Reality”, Heartland Institute, April 4, 1994
“found no connection between professional sports and manufacturing activity in approximately 90 percent of the tests conducted for a number of cities in the United States.It is likely that other factors, such as the tax environment and the existence of a skilled labor force, determine business location to a far greater extent than the presence of professional sports. “
A2 Protecting against corruption with injected competition
1. Unlikely this would work
John Siegfried and Andrew Zimbalist, “The Economics of Sports Facilities and Their Communities”, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2000, Pg. 98
“ New entry would introduce competition to the monopoly sports leagues, but it is unlikely. Many have tried, but few have succeeded (Quirk and Fort, 1992, chs. 8–9). The successes came primarily in the 1960s and 1970s, after a long period during which franchise expansion in the major sports leagues failed to keep pace with population growth, and in the midst of rapidly increasing demand for sports entertainment fueled by the coming of sports interest age of the post-World War II baby boomers and the expansion of access to television. Those were days before astronomical broadcast rights contracts and stadium subsidies had driven players’ salaries beyond the realm of normal incomes, and before the leagues realized that they could restrict the number of franchises so much as to attract an entire new league. Today it would be difficult, if not impossible, for a new league to successfully enter any of the four major team sports, and individual teams cannot enter without the cooperation of incumbents because they would have no one to play.”
A2 Tourism
1.Tourism won't increase.
Brad R. Humpherys, Dennis Coates, “Professional Sports Facilities, Franchises and Urban Economic Development”, UMBC Economics Department, 2013
Impact analysis studies also claim that a new sports facility will attract new visitors to a city, leading to additional economic benefits. Visitors attracted by a new sports facility may occupy hotel rooms and eat meals that would have been purchased by visitors who came to to the city for other reasons, and the direct spending on sport made by these visitors would have gone to other entertainment establishments. Porter (1999) and Porter and Fletcher (2002) report little or no increase in hotel occupancy rates, retail sales, or airport traffic in cities that hosted Super Bowls and Olympic Games in the U.S. in the past ten years.
A2: New revenue
1. Theoretically true but not in reality
Joseph L Bast, “Sports Stadium Madness Why It Started ò How To Stop It”, The Heartland Institute, Feb 23 1998, pg 9
A stadium would indeed generate “new money” for a metropolitan area if it attracted a significant percent of its fans from outside the immediate area. This is generally not the case for baseball and basketball, where “the number and frequency of games means that most of the market for ticket sales is metropolitan.” Football games, because there are fewer of them and they are scheduled on 22 weekends, draw fans from greater distances. However, the small number of football games—just eight regular season home games—means the total number of fans attending football games is much smaller than the number attending baseball or basketball games.
!!!!!!2.A Study by Robert Baade examined the impact of stadiums on the local economy of 30 major cities.
Robert A Baade, “Stadiums, Professional Sports, and Economic Development: Assessing the Reality”,Heartland Institute, April 4, 1994
Of the 30 MSAs where there was a change in the number of stadiums or arenas ten years old or less, 27 MSAs showed no significant relationship between the presence of a stadium and real, trend-adjusted, per capita personal income growth. In all three of the remaining cases (St. Louis, San Francisco/Oakland, and Washington D.C.), the presence of a sports stadium was significantly negative)
3, No new money
Aaron Gordon, “America Has A Stadium Problem”,Pacific Standard, July 17 2013,
Most fans do not spend additional money as a result of a new stadium; they re-direct money they would have spent elsewhere on movies, dining, bowling, tarot-card reading, or other businesses. And for every out-of-state fan who comes into the city on game day and buys a bucket of Bud Light Platinum, another non-fan decides not to visit and purchases his latte at the coffee shop next door. All in all, building a stadium is a poor use of a few hundred million dollars.
A2: Pub subs necessary
1. Most people prefer to watch sports on TV
Teena Hammond, “Stadiums race to digitize: How sports teams are scrambling to keep Millennials coming to games”, Tech Republic, 2013
Teams have faced the reality that it's a lot cheaper, and a lot easier, for a fan to watch the big game in their family room. So the teams have to make it more appealing than ever before to lure fans to the stadium. A recent Cisco study showed that 57% of fans prefer to watch the game at home.
2. Sports orgs would survive without public subs.
Journal of Economic Perspectives
The Economics of Sports Facilities and Their Communities P101
John Siegfried and Andrew Zimbalist
The struggle over surplus created by professional sports teams is largely an income distribution issue. The transfer of tax revenue to teams by providing them with free stadiums consists primarily of a transfer from taxpayers to players and owners.If all public subsidies to sports teams were eliminated, the existing teams could and would survive. Players’ salaries would decline, perhaps substantially, and teams owners would earn lower profits and capital gains.
NEIL DEMAUSE, NPR, (August 05, 2011) “The Nation: Stop The Subsidy-Sucking Sports Stadiums”:
Actually losing a team, though, is extremely rare. Most team owners prefer to keep plugging for new stadiums in their hometowns even after their bluff has been called. Florida Marlins president David Samson first declared in 2004 that a new stadium bill "has to happen in the next week. And if not, we'll move on." He repeated similar threats for four years, until the city of Miami and Miami-Dade County finally agreed to kick in more than $478 million for a new stadium with a retractable roof.”
A2: Stadium Subsides work
1. Stadiums do not support subsidies
Dennis Coates and Brad R. Humphreys, “Do Economists Reach a Conclusion on Sub- sidies for Sports Franchises, Stadiums, and Mega-Events?” Econ Journal Watch, 2008. Pg. 300
“ Within the promotional literature, proponents of stadium subsidies argue that subsidies are warranted because of the local economic development benefits of building a stadium or arena, including the “big league city” benefits. They do not support subsidies based on the consumer surplus derived by game attendance nor from consumer external benefits from such activities as talking about the teams or following them through the print or broadcast media.”
A2: Subs. Create jobs
(IN CASE 1ST CARD) 1. Not true,
Jonah Chodosh, “Take Me Out of the Ball Game: The Efficacy of Public Subsidies in the Success of Professional Sports Stadiums”, Claremont McKenna College, 2011, Pg.6
“Public subsidies for stadiums don’t seem to do as promised, as the “spin-off development” from construction doesn’t display the wishful trickle-down returns. Most jobs are transferred, rather than created, and income and wealth effects are menial, misinterpreted, and misleading”
(IN CASE 3RD)(TURN) 3.Job loss
Dennis Coates and Bra2. The jobs that are created pay very little and the influx of money going towards new stadiums.
Aaron Gordon, “America Has A Stadium Problem”,Pacific Standard, July 17 2013,
Economists have long known stadiums to be poor public investments. Most of the jobs created by stadium-building projects are either temporary, low-paying, or out-of-state contracting jobs—none of which contribute greatly to the local economy.(Athletes can easily circumvent most taxes in the state in which they play.)
d R. Humphreys (CATO Institute). “Caught Stealing: Debunking the Economic Case for DC Baseball.”
The presence of pro sports teams had a statistically significant negative impact on the retail and services sectors of the local economy.The average effect on employment in the services sector of a city’s economy was a net loss of 1,924 jobs as a result of the presence of a professional sports team. [WARRANT: FRANCHISE RELOCATION AND LOWER WAGES]
A2: Boosts the Economy
1. No economic help
Andrew Zimbalist and Roger G. Noll, The Brookings Institution, Summer 1997, Sports, Jobs, & Taxes: Are New Stadiums Worth the Cost?
In our forthcoming Brookings book, Sports, Jobs, and Taxes, we and 15 collaborators examine the local economic development argument from all angles: case studies of the effect of specific facilities, as well as comparisons among cities and even neighborhoods that have and have not sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into sports development.In every case, the conclusions are the same. A new sports facility has an extremely small (perhaps even negative) effect on overall economic activity and employment. No recent facility appears to have earned anything approaching a reasonable return on investment. No recent facility has been self-financing in terms of its impact on net tax revenues. Regardless of whether the unit of analysis is a local neighborhood, a city, or an entire metropolitan area, the economic benefits of sports facilities are de minimus.
2. Quantifies
Dennis Coates, professor of economics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008, “A Closer Look at Stadium Subsidies”, The American: The Online Magazine of the American Enterprise Institute.
Interestingly, Humphreys and I found that the overall sports environment—which, as mentioned earlier, includes the presence of franchises in multiple sports, the arrival or departure of teams, and stadium construction—in a given area reduced per capita personal income by about $10.In other words, every man, woman, and child in the metropolitan area was poorer by $10 as a result of the sports environment. This suggests that the public-good benefits are worth just enough to pay for the subsidies. Sports economists and policy analysts are using a variety of methods to get more precise estimates of the public-good benefits. In the future, we should know better whether these benefits are sufficient—in combination with private consumption benefits—to cover the public financing of professional sports stadiums.
A/2 Economic Sense in Subsidies
Principles of Economics, 7th Edition 2015 N. Gregory Mankiw Harvard University
“85% of economists agree that Local and state governments should eliminate subsidies to professional sports franchises.”
A2: Multiplier Effect
1. No real impact
According to The North American Association of Sports Economists,
In addition, Siegfried and Zimbalist (2000) note that the multiplier for sports related expenditures may be lower than that of other types of expenditures. This is because sports related expenditures are more likely to leak out of the local economy than non-sports ones (e.g. construction workers may be less likely to live in the local area, and therefore are not expected to spend their income locally) (Matheson and Baade, 2004).
2.Baade concludes multiplier effect fails
Community.seattletimes.nwsource.com,. Mariners Stadium -- Study Shows Public Funding Takes From Poor, Gives To Rich | Seattle Times Newspaper'. N. p., 2014. Web. 25 Jun. 2014.
What about the multiplier effect? Growth at Boeing and Microsoft creates jobs elsewhere in the economy. Baade and Sanderson say, forget it. "A dollar spent on professional sports rarely constitutes a dollar's worth of new spending within a community. To a large degree, citizens who spend money on sports are simply substituting one leisure option for another." The pie chart and companion article also give the lie to claims that money for the Mariners will not interfere with funding for our schools. Just under 20 percent of public funds will come from the state sales tax, accounting for an estimated $137 million over the next 20 years. This is money that would otherwise have gone into the general fund to finance education, a cleaner environment or possibly even a tax cut.”
A2: Disaster Relief/Katrina
United Academics/Elke Weesjes/ Surviving Sandy: Staying Put in Far Rockaway/January 31, 2013
“For New Yorkers,this fear of public shelters was likelyinfluenced not only by the lingering memories of Katrina-Superdome horror stories but also by the experiences of people familiar with homeless shelters in New York. Like many other residents of Far Rockaway—where poverty is widespread—Anderson knows a number of people whose circumstances forced them to make use of the city’s shelters. Their negative experiences exacerbated her own fear of shelters, as did her memories of Katrina coverage: “The governor in New Jersey said that if people decided to stay that they [emergency services] weren’t going to get them. People like him have to understand that it isn’t easy to pack up and go somewhere else. There is a real fear of the unknown. We knew there were shelters and that we could go there, but I know what happened after Katrina in the stadium—rapes, muggings, theft; I am not going to walk into that.”
A2 Comparison of two different worlds
My opponent calls for the comparison of a world with and a world without public subsidies. However, the links and impacts drawn from this become null and void, as the resolution asks for a comparison between benefits and drawbacks, not the conditions of one real-life situation and one hypothetical situation. As Public Forum is a debate in the present tense, I suggest we adhere to what the topic is asking us to engage in discourse about.
A2: Civic Pride
Dennis Coates and Brad R. Humphreys
October 27, 2004. “Caught Stealing: Debunking the Economic Case for D.C. Baseball”, Cato Institute.
A baseball team in D.C. might produce intangible benefits. Residents might have an enhanced sense of community pride and another opportunity to engage in a shared experience of civic expression. Perhaps some people will think that D.C.’s image as a “world-class city” will be further burnished. Rooting for the team will provide satisfaction to many local baseball fans. Yet thoseintangible benefits largely accrue to people interested in being fans of the baseball team and showing their support by purchasing tickets to games and team paraphernalia. That is hardly a reason for the city government to subsidize construction of a ballpark, or for the baseball team to avoid paying the cost to build it. District policymakers should not be mesmerized by the faulty impact studies that claim a baseball team and new stadium can be an engine of economic growth.
A/2 Neighborhoods benefitted
1. Not true
Dennis Coates and Brad R. Humphreys.Professional Sports Facilities, Franchises and Urban Economic Development. 2003.
However, a growing body of evidence indicates that professional sports facilities, and the franchises they are home to, may not be engines of economic growth in urban neighborhoods. Econometric studies of the determination of income and employment in US cities find no evidence of positive economic benefits associated with past sports facility construction and some studies find that professional sports facilities and teams have a However, a growing body of evidence indicates that professional sports facilities, and the franchises they are home to, may not be engines of economic growth in urban neighborhoods.Econometric studies of the determination of income and employment in US cities find no evidence of positive economic benefits associated with past sports facility construction and some studies find that professional sports facilities and teams have an impact on homes.