Foundation Briefs Advanced Level September/October Brief Resolved

Topic Analysis Two

The majority of the evidence favors the Con. To win on the Pro side, one has to rely on solid rebuttals and opponents that make mistakes. That being said, there are still some solid arguments that one can make on the Pro side of this resolution.

The first is the idea of a consumer surplus. Consumers are often charged more than what they can afford. Such is the nature of business. However, there are rare exceptions. In some cases businesses charge consumers less than what they are willing to pay. Such is the case with sports franchises. Even though consumers are willing to pay a lot of money for tickets, they are charged at much lower prices. The following pieces of evidence help prove this:

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  Further Analysis of the Irani study
  
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    These calculations produced consumers’ surplus estimates ranging from 2.2 to $54.1 million with an average around $18 million. Using Bain’s estimates of the cost incurred by local governments in accommodating sports teams, he concluded that in five of eight cases the consumers’ surplus exceeded this cost. Thus, his study suggests that public subsidies of professional sports teams can often pass the benefit-cost test.
    
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  NBA and NHL Arenas consistently create a net surplus
  
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    If elasticity is 0.75 or below, consumers’ surplus exceeds the annual payment on a $150 million arena for 23 of 26 NHL franchises and 24 of 29 NBA teams. In fact, even if elasticity is 1, consumers’ surplus is greater than the annual cost of a low cost basketball or hockey arena in 35 of 55 cases. Moreover, even high cost arenas pass the benefit-cost test in 41 cases if elasticity is 0.5.
    

Due to the nature of sports, most people see only the athletes and coaches that are employed by their favorite teams. Rarely does one think of the management when someone brings up the Yankees or the Patriots. Thus, the first task of anyone arguing the Con is to remind the judge that even professions like sports are held up by businessman. After that, establishing corruption is much easier. Due to the activities that led to the Great Recession in 2008, business leaders have lost much of the respect they used to have. The challenge is to get the judge to understand that the businessmen that run sports are not different from the ones that run the rest of the economy. Ultimately, you have to prove that they are both groups of people who have attained their current positions through pursuing profit at the expense of the general public.

Most people despise the role that money plays in politics. Democracies should be beholden to the interests of their people, but oftentimes they are instead influenced by rich donors. Every business spends money lobbying to create an environmental conducive to economic gain. While that may be expected behavior from corporations like Microsoft and J.P. Morgan, sports franchises never enter the conversation. Even though our favorite athletes may be playing on the field, the same types of business practices that are used by multinational corporations are also used by the people who run our favorite sports team.

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  Teams use money to influence the democratic process
  
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    In 1997, both San Francisco and the state of Washington held a referendum to determine whether to subsidize a new NFL stadium. Proponents in San Francisco outspent opponents by twenty-five to one and opponents in Washington were outspent eighty-to-one, with both referenda barely passing in favor of the subsidy.
    
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  Amount of money spent is sometimes unprecedented
  
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    The key factor, say sociologist Eckstein and his co-author Kevin Delaney, is to have a strong "growth coalition" of business leaders pushing for them — as when Cincinnati's powerful local chamber of commerce helped raise $1 million for a "Keep Cincinnati a Major-League City" campaign to raise sales taxes for new stadiums for the Reds baseball team and Bengals NFL franchise, more than double the city's previous record spending on any ballot initiative.
    
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  The public has no say
  
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    Usually, city officials do not give residents an opportunity to participate in, or object to their plans, insisting instead that a new sports arena will improve the local economy… These are the same officials who attend games sitting next to wealthy developers and team owners in the "sparkling new luxury boxes," while the average fan faces steeply increased ticket prices.
    

A basic idea in economics is opportunity cost. Opportunity cost is essentially the concept that making certain decisions robs you of the ability to make other ones. In the case of financial decisions, money spent on one object cannot be spent on another.

Opportunity cost applies to all government subsidies. The government has to support important functions of our society. These include building infrastructure, creating a social safety net, and providing for the general welfare. The government also spends money on more trivial pursuits such as the arts and entertainment. This is because while there are always more important needs to be met, government also has an obligation to create a vibrant and diverse social fabric.

Government expenditures on arts and entertainment still need to be as judicious as possible. Perhaps the best test of government subsidies for art and entertainment is whether or not these subsidies are necessary for the survival of a specific field. Stadium subsidies clearly fail this test. Since sports teams have enough money to finance their stadiums, subsidies become an unwise investment.

This resolution is an on balance resolution. An excellent way to overwhelm the Pro is not only force them to defend the monetary costs of subsidies but also their opportunity costs. If the money could have been spent on a better investment, or to fulfill a more urgent need in the community, the stadium subsidy also came at the expense of a brighter and better future. Here are a few examples of this situation:

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  Funding for stadiums comes at the expense of better options
  
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    Not only that, but the operating subsidies are almost certainly coming out of general fund revenues," he says. "If there's a ticket tax or anything that looks like a user tax, at least then the people who are enjoying the benefits are paying. But if it's operating subsidies coming out of general fund revenues, that's money that could go to any other alternative use in the city, like education or public safety”… Ryan Splitlog of Common Cause Georgia, a nonprofit, nonpartisan citizens' lobby, notes that the money going to the Falcons comes from hotel-motel tax revenue that is designated for promoting tourism and convention business.
    
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  Stadium construction saddles governments with annual debt DAT
  
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    According to Bloomberg…Businessweek, the U.S. Treasury loses $146 million a year on municipal bonds with tax-free interest issued for sports structures. The taxpayer subsidies to bondholders on the $17 billion tax-exempt debt on stadiums built in the last 27 years will be $4 billion. You know what would be a better use of $4 billion? Repairing roads, building sea walls, preparing for the next big storm.