There’s a long article in today’s Las Vegas Review-Journal profiling the “two Bobs” on either side of the city’s MLS stadium proposal: Bob Beers, the councilmember who’s been savaging the proposal on his blog, and Bob Coffin, the councilmember who was agin the stadium plan until it was amended to include $25 million in parks for his district, after which he was fer it. (Coffin says he finds accusations that he was “bribed” to support the deal “amusing.”)
The most notable bit, possibly, comes at the very end, where Coffin has this to say about how throwing public dollars at private enterprises can be good sometimes:
“I’m used to dealing with competing interests … People who want zero public dollars haven’t seen how things are built in this state. Tesla. Can I say Tesla? Can say I say that five or six times?”
You can say it all you want, but it might not mean what you think it means.
I could see Tesla actually having a positive economic impact as opposed to a stadium that sits empty most days. (Full disclosure, I own a few shares of Tesla and would buy a Tesla if I had the money.)
Tesla should have some economic impact, but even if they truly create 6,000 jobs, that’s still more than $200,000 in subsidies per job, which is godawful. And the company didn’t have to actually guarantee the 6,000 jobs, so it could easily end up a lot worse than that.
Tesla may or may not be a good private investment or a good product, but there’s no way this battery plant is going to end up being worth $1.3 billion to Nevada.
I agree the subsidies for Tesla sound outrageous. As I recall, you mentioned a lot of those types of deals in your book.