Panthers’ economic impact claims would require each fan to spend an extra $1000 per game

What’s a good way to distract people from the huge dollar figure that you’re asking the public to deliver to you for your stadium renovations? Throw out an even huger number, and call that “benefits”:

Panthers stadium renovations could generate $22 billion economic impact

If you’re even a semi-regular reader of this site, you’re probably already rolling your eyes: Economic consulting reports are usually just PR documents designed to make made-up numbers seem legit, and “economic impact” in particular is a largely meaningless term that can reflect people handing each other money with no benefit to the local economy. But sure, let’s check out these impact figures and see where they come from.

According to a slideshow on the city of Charlotte’s website, the current Carolina Panthers stadium generates $1.1 billion a year in economic impact (money changing hands) and $54.3 million in fiscal impact (actual taxes paid). The very fine print there reads “Source: Economic Impact Report created by Dr. Tom H. Regan, Department of Sport and Entertainment Management, University of South Carolina.” Regan, a trip to LinkedIn tells us, has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in accounting, and an educational doctorate in sport administration, none of which especially qualifies him to determine, for example, how much money spent at Panthers games would still be spent at other Charlotte-area events if the football team ceased to exist.

That $22 billion figure for additional impact from a renovated stadium — and $1 billion in actual taxes generated — isn’t actually in the city report, but just in a city statement quoted by WBTV. So we don’t know if it was calculated by Regan or just pulled out of city officials’ butts. We can, however, figure out what it would take to make those numbers real:

• Panthers owner David Tepper is agreeing to stay in town for an additional 20 years (or maybe 15 if he decides to pay to leave early, but let’s give him the benefit of the doubt here), meaning to get to $1 billion, the stadium renovations would have to generate an additional $50 million in tax revenues a year.
• The renovated stadium wouldn’t change the stadium’s capacity, so the additional tax money would have to be generated by the same number of fans that are currently attending Panthers games.
• Likewise, the Panthers’ payroll and the number of hotel stays wouldn’t go up just because there would be new bars for body-horror cloned fans to go to, so all of the new tax revenues would have to come from additional in-game spending.
• The Panthers draw about 600,000 fans a year to home games. That comes to $83 in additional taxes per fan per game.
• The Charlotte sales tax rate is 7.25%. So to generate $83 in sales taxes, each fan at each game would have to spend an additional $1149.

There might be a couple of other tax revenue streams to take into consideration, plus things like multiplier effects — it’s hard to say without seeing the actual report, if the actual report even shows its math — but suffice to say that the only way for renovations to an existing stadium for an existing team to have the kind of impact Charlotte city officials are claiming would be for ticket and concessions prices to go up astronomically. And even then, you’d have to account for how much those Panthers fans cut back on their spending on other things after dropping thousands of dollars just to go to a football game.

I just wrote all that without checking in on Economist Twitter, let’s see what it has to say about these claims:

Yep, that about covers it. I’m sure the North Carolina news media will correct its errors tomorrow and hahaha, no, that never happens. But we can pretend it will, and if there’s one thing this whole situation proves, it’s that if you pretend hard enough, you can have it called news — now just let me fire up Powerpoint…