[Tinordi]

I don't have time to go through Cleveland's "critiques" but they're thoroughly rooted in anecdotal, trivial cases. The article posted that he reviewed is supported by many many many other articles that have come to the same conclusions. This isn't some broad axe to grind, it's using theory and data to come to the same conclusion over and over.

I will address this:

1. House hold spending on sports - basic claim here is that on a PER household basis people spend the same whether there are sports or not. Meaning if you have a sports team in your town, people won't spend more on the team, they'll simply take money from other spend and put it towards sports, meaning the community doesn't see any increased spend. I wouldn't acutally dispute that point, PER house hold spend makes sense. Some key variables that are missing are the following:

Good so you agree that the basic reasoning is sound.

- Do cities with Sports facilities actually attract MORE households to the area? Thus increasing the total pool of money spent in the area (which is good). The PER house hold is only one important variable, the total house holds and total spend are also key.

Very specious to think that a pro sports team attracts more households. Net migration to a city is primarily dependent on economic opportunity and the network effect (for immigrants). Vancouver lost 2000 young families last year all while the Canucks were at the height of their popularity. Why? Economic conditions vastly trumped whether there was adequate pro sport entertainment options.

This point is just not convincing at all. And it stands that pro sports team or not, consumption on entertainment would on the balance be equal with or without pro sports.

- What was the time frame on the PER household stats? One year, two years after losing a sports team? The parameters of the study aren't laid out so we don't know if it's citing long term or short term metrics.

There's a huge canon of economic studies look at household budgets and spending over years of study. The conclusion is sound.

2. Argument that sports distracts workers and makes them less productive hurting the economy. - Not much needed to say about this. It was simply an incredibly poorly backuped claim. They even used the word MAY RESULT in making the claim, then sited some studies that even the author of this article didn't seem to want to trumpet too hard.

Agree this argument is probably the weakest but there still ample reasoning along other lines to not support public financing of pro sports.

Argument that it would take away from funding other areas. Again, simply a weak argument that actually wasn't even backed up with reference to another study, let alone some actual critical data. All it said, again using the word MAY, is that maybe there might be less policeman or something. Rediculously weak argument with no backing.

The fact that you made this point makes me question your ability to evaluate this issue in a reasoned manner. See my posts responding to Resolute on why this is not reasonable. Spending a dollar on something means not spending a dollar somewhere else. You don't need to make a reference to another study the point is so basic.

4. This one was hilarious, and basically irrelevant argument to the story. Making a claim that much of the revenue created by sports franchises goes towards players salaires. Fair. Then goes on to claim that Sports players save more of their money than the average joe, so spend less of it on the local economy???? Really, that's the argument? Then backed up by some loose point about the wealthy saving more? Doesn't mention anything about the wealthy also paying more taxes.

Well here's the argument. Pro sports bring in lots of money and revenue, that revenue will then trickle down to the rest of the economy and rise the tide. But what's been shown is that, in the NHL at least 57% of the revenue goes to players, but those players don't reinject that revenue to the local economy due to the high savings rates. So to say that the new revenue will impact the local economy is not convincing.

On the tax argument, sure millionaires pay more taxes, a pittance compared to the tax revenues that were diverted into paying for the friggin arena in the first place. It's basically a terrible investment of tax dollars out to tax dollars in. Again a very basic point.

Then the kicker is it goes on to proudly claim that these four examples show that money spent on a sports facility generate less additional income than if spent elsewhere, even though no where in the argument does it remotely show that. It also claims that as long as "all other things are equal" this holds true (which again it still didn't prove that), but it also glosses over the fact that rarely will all things be equal in comparing a city with sports facilities and ones with out, potentially because of what the sports facilities drive into the area.

This makes me question whether you read or even understood the article. The address this point directly here:

Siegfried and Zimbalist (2000) recently surveyed the growing
literature on retrospective studies of the economic impact of sports
facilities and franchises on local economies. The literature published
in peer-reviewed academic journals differs strikingly from the
predictions in “economic impact studies.” No retrospective
econometric study found any evidence of positive economic impact
from professional sports facilities or franchises on urban economies.
While evidence exists suggesting that narrowly defined occupational
groups, like workers employed in the sports industry (SIC Code
industry 79 – Recreation and Amusements), benefit from the
construction of new sports facilities, building new sports facilities
and attracting new professional sports teams did not raise income
per capita or total employment in any US city. In fact, some research
has found a negative economic impact of professional sports on urban
economies.

I guess you don't know what econometric studies are, so here's a brief summary. They take observations of factors that affect a dependent variable, in this case economic growth of a municipality and find the correlation between various factors and the dependent variable. The regression analysis will then weight each factor based on how correlated it is the dependent. In order to do this you need observations of cities with both pro sports franchises and those without. By very nature, this analysis baselines between cities or between years. Your criticism is fundamentally invalid and shows that you do not actually understand the points being made.

I honestly appreciate your effort to address this but I think a better approach would have been to come asking questions instead of making more baseless statements.