A Voice of Sanity in Washington

Let's consider the recent evidence on sports stadiums. More and more people are starting to sit down and realize that, as nice as it is to have a sports team in their hometown, they certainly do not want to pay obscene amounts of money to subsidize them. And teams have basically been in a less powerful position to push cities around on this matter because the market in professional sports is glutted and there is growing evidence that (surprise) large publicly funded stadiums, like most government spending, don't promote economic growth.

Still in an era when cities all across the country are telling sports owners to start paying for their own stadiums, leave it to the last U.S. bastion of socialism east of Berkeley, DC, to offer major league baseball to pay for a 400 million dollar stadium through taxes and bonds when there's already a franchise 30 miles away. Mayor Anthony Williams, in a Marion Barryesque lie, even had the gall yesterday to tell the people of Washington yesterday that they won't being paying for the stadium because it will be financed by bonds and business taxes.

Well, of course they will, and as Sally Jenkins points out in today's Pravda, it could very easily set up a scenario in which baseball could leave the District - again.