The Buffalo News is continuing its weekly reporting on the Bills stadium situation, this Saturday turning to an interview with former New York lieutenant governor and current Greater Rochester Chamber of Commerce CEO Robert Duffy, for some reason, about what he thinks of plans to spend lots of state money on a $1.4 billion football stadium for a team that just got $130 million in stadium renovations in 2013. (That earlier deal was spearheaded by the state’s then-lieutenant governor, one Robert Duffy.) And if it’s a questionable journalistic decision to devote scarce reporting space to this one not-at-all-disinterested guy’s opinions, we should nonetheless be glad they did it, because it produced this all-time gem:
“In government, if that money is not spent on that project, it will be spent somewhere else.”
That is just beautifully concise, and undermined only slightly by being both wrong and a blatant use of misdirection. First off, it is simply not true that government spent on big capital subsidies “will be spent somewhere”: Whether whatever New York Gov. Kathy Hochul decides to give to Bills owners Kim and Terry Pegula toward a stadium comes via tax rebates, or state bonds that have to be paid off later, or straight out of the general treasury, that’s money that has to come from somewhere, either by raising taxes or by cutting spending on something else.
But even if we take it as a given that governments gonna spend, “somewhere else” covers a hell of a lot of ground. If we don’t give the money to the Bills owners, the state will just go blow it on school funding or keeping the trains running or something is a pretty remarkable argument to make, though certainly on-brand for a guy whose current job is to advocate for tax cuts and other subsidies for local business owners.
Duffy does say that if state taxpayers are going to send a huge check to the Pegulas, there should be “a long-term agreement, so you’re not going back every four or five years trying to keep the team here,” which is a reasonable point. He does not, however, suggest that the state should have nailed down a longer-term agreement the last time it send a huge check the team’s way — who was the guy who negotiated that deal again? It seems to have slipped my mind…
If Duffy ever runs for office in California, he has my vote based on that quote alone.