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

Resolution: On balance, public subsidies for professional athletic organizations in the United States benefit their local communities. Definitions: Subsidy: A grant of money that is given by the government to an industry or business so that the price of a service or commodity can remain low. Investment: A sum of money that is borrowed by a business with the intent of making additional profit for the investor and business. Professional: engaged in a specified activity as one's main paid occupation rather than as a pastime. Athletics Organizations: Sports unions which provide the major income for their players, staff, and executives. Professional Sports Organization: A team that is paying its players with a monetary value in the form of cash as opposed to other compensation; when players are compensated and not paid the organization is considered "amateur" making college, high school, and all other level sports where competitors are not paid "amateur". Local Communities: The community locally associated with a sports organization. C1: It creates lots of debt. Giving public subsidies to sports takes large amounts of money from other government funds and creates a large amount of debt. James Runzheimer, a lawyer, said about building sports stadiums through subsidies, "It"s part of the corruption of the federal tax system. It"s use of government funds to subsidize activity that the private sector can finance on its own." According to Bloomberg, building, maintaining, etc., sports facilities is costing the US Treasury $146 million a year. Also, there are 21 NFL teams that play in stadiums that have been built or fixed up in the past 25 years. Dennis Zimmerman, a retired Congressional Research Service economist, place the annual cost of these 21 stadiums at $24.3 million, all coming from taxpayers. The debt for the new Cowboy"s stadium is $321.5 million, also coming from taxpayers. There are many other examples of this all throughout the country which results in people spending lots of money that will not be returned. C2: It doesn"t bolster local economies. Professional sports stadiums don"t bolster economies because they are financed by pension cuts according to sfgate.com. Economist Victor Matheson said, "Sports stadiums typically aren"t a good tool for economic development. Take whatever number the sports promoter says; take it and move the decimal one place to the left. Divided it by ten, and that"s a pretty good estimate of the actual economic impact." An article on sfgate.com stated, "A $19 billion subsidy is planned to be paid...by cutting as many as 700 librarians and 300 police officers." An article on the Illinois News Bureau said that a study done by sports economist Brad Humphreys and his colleague Dennis Coates revealed the statistical negative impacts on the local economy. Some of these are an average net loss of 1,924 jobs and a reduction in wages at restaurants and bars. A major negative impact would be that crime would increase in the community due to the heavy cut in law enforcement, and the economy would lose money because of the job loss and decrease of wages. C3: Sports don"t really need subsidies. Public subsidies to support sports aren"t even really necessary. According to MLive, the Michigan Whitecaps and the Great Lakes Loons, two minor league baseball teams in Michigan, built and run everything through private investment funds. Lew Chamberlin, the CEO of the Whitecaps said, "That was probably the smartest thing we ever did. It gave us complete control of the franchise. It meant we were in no way beholden to any public bodies." Chamberlin continues, saying that the stadium generates reasonable returns, making them able to continue to upgrade their stadium. The Loons" baseball park cost $34 million. It was built on donated land, and funded by a nonprofit organization. When the ballpark opened in 1994 it broke the national Class A attendance record that season with 475,212 fans, which shows that without bringing on tons of debt and wasting tax dollars, teams can still make a great stadium that lots of people like.