June 16, 2010
Ohio pol: Fund stadiums by cutting health care for poor
Public stadium spending always has a cost — public anything spending always has a cost, as it's money that can't be used elsewhere — but it's seldom made as explicit as in last week's proposal by Hamilton County commissioner Greg Hartmann to pay for shortfalls in Cincinnati's stadium funds by cutting health care spending on the poor.
Hartmann's plan has drawn tons of criticism since, with his fellow commissioner (and longtime stadium critic) Todd Portune saying it proposed paying for “sports palaces on the backs of the sick, the injured, the destitute and the poor," while the Cincinnati Enquirer called it "outrageous" and "simply wrong on several levels." The Cincinnati city council chimed in on Monday, passing a resolution to oppose the plan, with the resolution's sponsor saying Hartmann's scheme "basically takes from the poor, you might say, basically to give to the rich."
All of which is true, but it's worth noting that the original stadium-funding plan — a half-cent sales tax hike, which is currently running shortfalls thanks to the broken economy — was no less so: Not only do sales taxes hit the poor much harder than the rich, but that's a revenue stream that now can't be used for other public benefits (including hospital funding for the poor).
The real problem was giving to the rich in the first place — the only thing left to battle over now is whether to take from the poor (via health care cuts) or the middle class (via property tax hikes, the elephant in the room that the county commission is desperately trying to avoid). Nobody's proposing trying to get the money back from the teams themselves — though I guess Portune tried that with his antitrust suit, only to be tripped up by that pesky statute of limitations.
