Squeeze play: tax handouts for sports zillionaires - great idea!

• Author: Hazlett, Thomas W.

Ah, the national pastime. Baseball is enjoying a fine season, spurred on by the expansion of both leagues, a fortuitous act that welcomes the civilized sport to new venues and, incidentally, calls up a pride of eager young minor league pitchers to the Big Show. Small wonder that an all-star team of power hitters, led by Ken Griffey Jr. in the American League and Mark McGwire in the National, is on pace to break Roger Maris's single-season home-run record.

But the big baseball news has increasingly little to do with earned-run averages or pennant races, but with public financing of new stadiums. The idea of the ballpark as municipal development project has become as American as Cal Ripken Jr., who as a Baltimore Oriole plays in Camden Yards, the Taj Mahal of government-subsidized sports palaces.

The theory is that building a gleaming new stadium is a great high for fans. Let me confirm the allegation: I know I heartily enjoy a trip to Camden Yards, even though I have no interest in American League teams or players. But I also heartily enjoy, as does ex-Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, a trip to Morton's steak house. The question really is: Why is one a legitimate claimant for taxpayer funds?

The main argument is that ballparks generate massive economic development, revitalizing cities almost as fast as the Florida Marlins can liquidate a championship team. New York Mayor Rudolph Guiliani points to a study by his administration that shows consumer spending in Manhattan would rise $1 billion per year if a new Yankee Stadium were built on the West Side - plus "thousands and thousands and thousands of jobs," in the mayor's precise calculation.

The reality is that the studies trotted out to justify the public subsidy are as phony as the zeros they arbitrarily tack onto their empirical estimates. Not only don't city planners know what new benefits will materialize, they have little idea - or incentive to discover what existing spending will be quashed by the diversion. Folks who blow $100 on a Yankees-Indians game, two hot dogs, four beers, and a nonfat double latte are not going to spend that same sum that same night dining out at Elaine's. In New York, the opportunity cost of moving the Yankees' home to 33rd Street and 11th Avenue is painfully apparent to those in the Bronx, "a borough whose identity is inextricably linked to the ball club," as The New York Times put it.

Yet sports stadiums are perfect vehicles for city hall insiders to wheel and deal...