Oh what fun...

It's quite amusing as when Zimbalist was teaching my class at Smith he was VERY against public funding of stadiums. It seems from the article that his real comments in the article are about "well it could be worse."

Of course the one figure i NEVER see any one use is what the federal goverment is chipping into this project since there are tax free bonds being used. Even though a billion acts of congress and such tried to shut the sports stadium tax-free bonds loop hole people still find more holes. So if they are using 500m 30 years bonds at 7%(Completly made up numbers, but i am sure you know what the numbers are), Since the people investing probably are at the 35% bracket, and NYS of 8% i think. So the extra "sunsidies tossed in by federal and state are: I think about an extra $60Million. That should be included too. Ok that's all for now.

Charles Bagli in the Times reported that the tax-exempt bond subsidy would come to $14.9m a year on a $700m stadium. It's extremely unlikely that they'd be able to do $700m in tax-exempt bonds - the valuation of the property wouldn't be high enough to support it - but my preliminary numbers still show a present-value cost to taxpayers of about $50m per stadium (Mets, Yanks, and Nets). I hope to have more on this within the next week or so.