Welfare for the rich is OK when it's for teams like Bills, Titans to build new stadiums | Opinion

Build your own playgrounds, billionaires.

You want a shiny new stadium for the team that has padded your net worth? Or a swanky, state-of-the-art practice facility for the franchise that sets you apart from the rest of the uber rich? Then write the checks yourself. You can afford it – certainly better than those taxpayers you think should be grateful for the privilege of picking up your tab.

These stadium boondoggles are nothing more than welfare for the rich, and the people who will be on the hook for it are wise to the con.

A poll released Monday by Siena College found that 63% of New York voters oppose the $600 million the state has pledged for a new stadium for the Buffalo Bills. Of those who live upstate, and so would theoretically be more likely to be Bills fans, 68% disapproved of the state’s contribution to the stadium project.

In a country that can barely see eye to eye on anything, that is a staggering level of agreement.

It also echoes the feelings of residents in a Nashville neighborhood near the Tennessee Titans stadium, almost 90% of whom said in a February survey that they opposed public funding for a new venue. Tennessee lawmakers last week approved $500 million in state funding for a new, enclosed stadium. 

And yet, after several years of relative fiscal sanity when it comes to these handouts for billionaires, state and local leaders are once again falling for the scam. Rather than making team owners pay for their new stadiums or arenas themselves, or limiting public money to infrastructure, officials are back throwing money at the rich.

“Study after study has shown that stadiums are terrible public investments. The taxpayers financing them rarely want to pay for them,” Victor Matheson, a sports economist at Holy Cross, wrote in an analysis of the Buffalo deal, which he described as “one of the worst stadium deals in recent memory.

“So why,” Matheson asked, “are governments willing to subsidize them?”

An excellent question. As our wealth gap continues to widen, this country’s ability to rationalize welfare depending on the recipient is mind-boggling.  

We decry it as a waste when it’s money and services that keep the working poor afloat, even if those benefits can actually help break the cycle of poverty. Yet when corporations and professional sports teams – entities that can afford to pay their own way – get public funds or tax breaks, it’s shrugged off as the cost of doing business.

It’s considered a moral failing when someone making minimum wage, or less, needs public assistance. But it’s a community good when Bills owners Terry and Kim Pegula, who have a net worth of $5.8 billion according to Forbes, ask for it.

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People struggling to make ends meet aren’t deserving of a helping hand. But Carolina Panthers owner David Tepper, a billionaire many times over who walked away from a deal for a new practice facility in Rock Hill, S.C., because public funding didn’t come through in the way he wanted, is.

The rationale is that these projects benefit the entire community through the jobs and increased revenues they generate. But that myth has been debunked. Repeatedly.

Team owners will also hold the threat of moving elsewhere over their communities and fans; in defending the state funding for the Bills, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said other cities were circling around the small-market team.

“I was aware that they were being reached out to by other cities that have lost teams before. That is real,” Hochul said in an April 13 interview with WNYC. “They had definitely other options.”

“My entire life," she added, "there was talk of them going to Toronto.”

And yet, the Bills have never left Buffalo.   

Yes, Dean Spanos took his ball and went to Los Angeles when the people of San Diego declined to give him millions to build a stadium. Mark Davis moved the Raiders to Las Vegas after that city offered to build him a new home – which has gone really well, by the way.

But especially now that Los Angeles has two NFL teams, there is not a glut of cities in position to lure a professional team away. Not at the considerable expense that’s going to be involved, anyway. So why not call the owners’ bluff?

They have the means to pay their own way. They simply don't want to.

Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Nancy Armour on Twitter @nrarmour.