On balance, public subsidies for professional athletic organizations in the United States benefit th

Thanks to Con for the quick response! I'll start by attacking my opponent's points. In Con's first contention, my opponent argues that public subsidies for stadiums create a significant amount of debt, but my opponent fails to take into account the economic growth that comes with stadiums. In Con's second contention my opponent argues that stadiums don't, in fact, bolster local economies, but this is simply wrong. As I mentioned in the first round, the construction of AT&T Stadium in Dallas has created more than 4,000 jobs. The average NFL stadium employs 3,739 people, and is a major component of the economy. My opponent has also failed to realize that, as I stated in Contention 2, professional athletes pay a huge amount of money in taxes. As a result, the negative side effects such as cuts in law enforcement that my opponent brought up in Contentions 1 and 2 do not occur. Moving on to Contention 3. Con has tried to argue here that public subsidies are not needed for sports stadiums, but as I mention in Contention 4, this is not the case. The Loons baseball park can barely be considered a stadium. As my opponent mentioned, the construction cost was just $34 million, which is on the very low end of stadium costs. What I'm getting at is that although a non-profit was able to fund the Loons park, my opponent cannot show that this would work for larger stadiums with a larger footprint and budget. Chances are that land would not have been donated for Loons Park if it were the size of AT&T Stadium. Now I'll go on to defend my own contentions. The underlying theme in Con's last speech was his arguing that most of my contentions would also occur with privately funded stadiums. However, in my fourth contention, I clearly expressed why this was not the case. I'm not sure that my opponent fully grasps the concept of eminent domain, so I will explain it below. Eminent Domain: the right of a government or its agent to expropriate private property for public use, with payment of compensation. The government CAN take away private property in order to build publicly funded stadiums. The same cannot be done for privately funded stadiums. The Georgia Institute of Technology has quite clearly determined that stadiums have a much larger economic benefit when built in the Central Business District of a city. However, when you look at the CBD of almost any major American city, you'll see that there is not the land to build a stadium. This means that if a stadium is privately funded, it must be located in a suburban area where the economic benefit is not as significant. Publicly funded stadiums, on the other hand, could be built on occupied land. This essentially knocks down my opponent's responses to my first and second contention. In response to my third contention, Con tried to assert that privately funded stadiums had the same benefits as publicly funded stadiums when it comes to alternate uses. This is true in situations except emergencies. Privately funded stadiums are under no obligation to act as emergency shelters during natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, while publicly funded stadiums are. Therefore, my third contention still stands. Finally, I'd like to mention the wording of this resolution. The resolution states that public subsidies for athletic organizations in the United States benefit their local communities. The resolution does NOT ask if privately funded stadiums would have the same or a greater effect. My opponent has made his case for privately funded stadiums in this round by saying that they have the same effects as publicly funded stadiums, but this is conceding that public stadiums benefit their communities to an extent. In theory, I could agree with Con that all of my points are true with privately funded stadiums, but Pro would still win the debate, because Con has failed to show that publicly funded stadiums detriment their local communities.