It’s the most exciting time of the year, as the Titans get ready for another season of presumably bad football. While the Titans on the field performance has been horrendous over the past few years, the performance of politicians who funded the team’s stadium with our money has been even worse.
I should start of by saying I’m a huge football fan and always have been. There is nothing better than NFL Sundays, and having moved to Nashville a year and a half ago, it’s great to have the Titans in town. I’ve even adopted the Titans as my team of choice, buying a Kendall Wright jersey and drafting numerous Titans to my fantasy team. However, my sense of justice and fairness precedes my love of football.
Nissan Stadium (until recently known as LP Field) was built in 1999 at a cost over $291 million dollars; $207 million of that total came from taxpayers. This is absolutely unacceptable, and here are three reasons why.
- It’s not the government’s job to fund private industry.
In the same way Beacon fights against corporations receiving taxpayer money, we also don’t believe the government should take taxpayer money to fund a stadium for a professional football team. The idea that Tennessee taxpayers are forced to fund billionaires through coercion is absolutely unfair and immoral.
- The Titans will survive without taxpayer money if they are valuable.
As a proud capitalist, I believe that any good or service that offers value to consumers will survive in the market. The only way to measure this is to see if a product or service makes money without help from the government. The point is that if the Titans were really that valuable to the city of Nashville, people would pay for tickets unsubsidized, and they could survive on their own without government intervention. I truly believe that the Titans would not only survive, but also thrive without any taxpayer money.
- It’s unfair to middle- and low-income residents.
As someone who is both firmly in the middle class and a football fan, it’s unfathomable to me that my tax dollars are going to a team that I can’t often afford to see. The idea that the tax dollars of low-income and middle-class Nashvillians goes to a football team through the force of government, and these very same people don’t have the money to afford tickets to a game is criminal. At least when tax dollars go to a park or anything in the public space, taxpayers have the opportunity to get some sort of return on investment by using the space. Taking money from people who can’t afford to buy tickets to games has absolutely no return on investment.
Taxpayer subsidies for stadiums happen in almost every city with a professional team and are among the worst examples of corruption between government and big business. With a new stadium for the Titans potentially on the horizon, it’s time that we sack these subsidies before we waste more taxpayer money.