There Used To Be A Ball Park

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Posted By: boxingcardman

"This is America...business is free to profit at will from its own hard work" is all well and fine but it is a big, fat corporatist lie.

Yankees Stadium is being built on a foundation of public money and tax breaks. What do you call a diversion of tax money into private hands? If it is $600 a month to feed a kid, you call it welfare; if it is $450 million to subsidize a private enterprise, you call it capitalism as usual. The stadium is typical corporate welfare: socialize the costs, privatize the profits. The city's share includes allowing the Yankees to occupy 22 acres of Macombs Dam Park and John Mullaly Park (which is already used for stadium parking on game days), and to build parking garages on those parks. City-funded artificial surface will be placed on top of those parking garages to make up for the lost parkland. The parking garage project cost: $320 million. The city foregoes rent and property taxes on the garages. No property taxes? Sweet! Demolition costs for the historic Yankee Stadium? Public money too. New York state taxpayers will pay $70 million to help the Yankees build parking garages (as authorized by the State Legislature). City and State taxpayers will forgo up to $7.5 million annually in lost taxes resulting from the sale of $225 million in tax-exempt bonds authorized on October 9, 2007, by the New York City Industrial Development Agency (administered by the New York City Economic Development Corporation) to finance construction and renovation of the parking garages. If the parking revenues are not enough to pay a reported $3.2 million land lease to the City of New York, the entity that will operate the parking garages and collect revenue will be able to defer that payment. All told, the Yankees and the taxpayers can each expect to pay about $450 million, and the Yankees will cover the remaining costs from diverting revenue sharing payments that would have been paid to the other baseball teams [under the CBA they can deduct stadium costs from the luxury tax.

If I lived in NYC I would be very, very pissed too. Being priced out of a private enterprise is one thing; being priced out of something my tax dollars are subsidizing is something else entirely.

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