Quotulatiousness

July 13, 2012

The only long-term answer to road congestion: real-time tolls

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:04

I know, I know … I hate paying road tolls as much as the next driver. But the current road pricing scheme is broken and getting broken-er. Andrew Coyne points out the unpleasant realities:

… the demand for road use — traffic — is not a fixed quantity. Like anything else, it fluctuates with the price. And the price to use the roads, under present policies, is denominated in time: that is, by how long people are prepared to stew in traffic. This is, when you think about it, perverse. The people who get first claim on the roads are the ones who put the lowest value on their time. Or in other words, the people who need them the least.

That’s why analysts have long recommended pricing roads in more conventional terms, i.e. dollars and cents. But there are lots of ways of getting even this wrong, so we need to eliminate a couple more alternatives, such as:

More taxes. Many people’s first response to the notion of pricing roads is to say “but I already pay a gas tax.” The more knowledgeable will point to statistics showing that revenues from gas taxes more than pay for the cost of building and maintaining the roads.

But these are far from the only costs at issue, or even the most important. As far as congestion is concerned the cost that matters is not the cost of building the road, but the cost of using it. Every time you use the road, you impose a cost on other drivers, so far as you make the roads that much more crowded — as they, of course, do you. Add up those costs over millions of drivers every day — costs measured not only in delays, but in more collisions, more wear and tear, more pollution, and so on — and we are well into the billions, according to several estimates.

[. . .]

What’s really needed, then, is a more comprehensive approach. With modern technology, there’s no reason to toll only some roads and not others. Using GPS-style in-car transponders and satellites, it’s now possible to charge drivers to use the roads generally, with the highest charges applying in downtown centres and at rush-hour — just as you pay a higher charge to use your cellphone depending on the location and time of day. You’d even get a monthly bill in the mail.

Far-fetched? Britain and the Netherlands have each been on the verge of adopting similar schemes in recent years. That each backed down in the end tells you something of the political sensitivities involved: It’s always hard to get people to pay for things they are used to getting for free. But the roads aren’t free. We’re paying more and more to use them every year.

Pay in congestion, in time and noise and aggravation — or pay by credit card. Once you think of it that way, the choice should be easy.

July 11, 2012

Obama’s tax proposal being misreported by all major media outlets

Filed under: Government, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:48

How so? Dan Amira explains:

Obama is not proposing that families making up to $250,000 a year keep their tax cuts while families making more than that don’t. He’s proposing that every family keep their tax cuts on their first $250,000 of taxable income (which is not the same as “income” or “earnings,” by the way).

That includes families with taxable income of $260,000, $1 million, $5 billion, $3 trillion, or whatever Jay-Z and Beyonce make in a year. Everyone would continue to pay a lower tax rate on their first $250,000 of taxable income under Obama’s plan. To report that Obama only wants to maintain tax cuts for families making less than $250,000 is simply false.

[. . .]

Normally, a president would want to publicize that he’s trying to cut taxes for everyone in the country. But Obama actually has an incentive this time to downplay the number of Americans who would benefit from his tax plan. His proposal is, at its heart, a political maneuver meant to force Mitt Romney to defend tax cuts for the wealthy. It’s more effective, then, for it to be seen as a cut solely for the middle class. The reality is that Obama’s proposal would also keep Warren Buffett’s taxes lower, if only a little bit.

H/T to Iowahawk for the link.

July 10, 2012

American exceptionalism, especially in taxation

Filed under: Business, Government, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:19

Mark Steyn on the unique American perspective on taxes:

Elsewhere in the world, there are two generally accepted bases for taxation: residency and source of income. Most countries tax you if you live within their borders, some tax you if you live elsewhere but earn money within their jurisdiction, but only America claims the right to tax you simply for being American — even if you, say, live in Belgium but drive over the border to work in Luxembourg every day. This is unique to the United States: Spain taxes you if you’re a resident of Spain; Slovenia taxes you if you’re a resident of Slovenia; but America taxes you if you’re an American who’s working as a teacher in Gabon. You’re at permanent risk of double taxation, and the fines for minor and accidental infraction are arbitrary and confiscatory.

As I say, no other developed country does this — although Eritrea does.

On January 1st 2013, all this gets worse. The FATCAT act (technically, it’s FATCA, but we all get the acronymic message) makes it not worth a foreign bank’s while to do business with Americans. I don’t just mean Mitt Romney’s chums in the Cayman Islands, but an American of modest means on a two-year secondment to Hong Kong requiring a small checking account with which to pay local utility bills — or a small businessman attempting to expand his distribution in Canada.

Maybe you don’t care about these people: Why can’t the business guy expand his business in Michigan or Idaho like true-blue Americans would do, etc? But at a time when America is ever more mortgaged to foreigners, making it more difficult for Americans to go out and earn money from the rest of the planet doesn’t seem a smart move. Unless you’re planning on making U.S. citizenship a combination food-stamp card. American exceptionalism and American isolationism are not the same thing.

More to the point, the 2008 “exit tax”, the existing foreign bank-account disclosure paperwork, the new FATCAT act, and even the recent habit of publishing the names of those who renounce citizenship are simply inappropriate in a free society.

July 2, 2012

Here’s what to expect to pay in Obamacare penalty tax

Filed under: Government, Health, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:10

There are no easy answers in figuring out in advance exactly what taxes will apply to any given person, but Henry Blodget at Business Insider outlines what to expect in general terms:

  • The penalty/tax will be phased in from 2014 to 2016.
  • The minimum penalty/tax in 2016 will be $695 per person and up to 3-times that per family. After 2016, these amounts will increase at the rate of inflation.
  • The minimum penalty/tax per person will start at $95 in 2014 (and then increase through 2016)
  • No family will ever pay more than 3X the per-person penalty, regardless of how many people are in the family.
  • The $695 per-person penalty is only for those who make between $9,500 and ~$37,000 per year. If you make less than ~$9.500, you’re exempt. If you make more than ~$37,000, your penalty is calculated by the following formula…
  • The penalty is 2.5% of any household income above the level at which you are required to file a tax return. That level is currently $9,500 per person and $19,000 per couple. The penalty on any income above that is 2.5%. So the penalty can get expensive quickly if you make a lot of money.
  • However, the penalty can never be more than the cost of a “Bronze” heath insurance plan purchased through one of the state “exchanges” that will be created as part of Obamacare. The CBO estimates that these policies will cost $4,500-$5,000 per person and $12,000-$12,500 per family in 2016, with the costs rising thereafter.

Update: In spite of all the agonized wailing from the Republicans (especially the Tea Party folks), Steve Chapman is determined to find the limited government silver lining in the Obamacare decision:

While it was upholding the mandate, the court was striking down an equally important part of the law: the requirement that states greatly expand Medicaid coverage, at a cost of about $1 trillion between 2014 and 2022. The administration sought to force states to go along by threatening to take away all their Medicaid funds — not just those provided for the expansion. But Roberts and Co. said no.

Does it matter? You bet. It’s the first time the court has ever said Washington went too far in the conditions it places on money sent to state governments. The ruling will give states more latitude to make their own decisions in all sorts of areas.

The case also registered a victory for the notion that judges should apply the Constitution in an impartial way rather than simply impose their policy preferences. George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr, writing on the conservative-libertarian blog The Volokh Conspiracy, said the overall decision was “a largely conservative opinion that just happens to get to a liberal result.”

Equally significant is that it took a worse health care option off the table. The irony of the challenge is that if Obamacare had been struck down, supporters of universal health coverage would have been left with no good option but a “single-payer” system, also known as “Medicare for all” — which is undoubtedly constitutional.

Whatever the flaws of Obamacare, it at least builds on the existing system of private insurance. Vermont’s self-proclaimed socialist senator, Bernie Sanders, used the court’s decision to renew his call for a single-payer system. But for him, the verdict was the worst thing that could have happened.

For anyone even slightly open to evidence, letting Obamacare take effect will provide an illuminating experiment in how to afford the miracles of the American medical system to more people, including many in dire need. It may be a failure, or it may be a success. But it will not be uninformative.

June 22, 2012

Charities: the Trojan Horse for expansion of government

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:51

Some charities are still what they were twenty years ago: organizations that provide help to those in need. Others, however, have morphed into specialized entities that exist primarily to lobby the government for more funds … to allow them to lobby more efficiently:

The relationship between charities and the British state has been significantly transformed in the past 15 years. There is a gulf between the public’s perception of what is charitable – a traditional view still dominated by visions of self-sacrificing volunteers and jumble sales – and the third sector’s view of itself as a more caring, semi-professional wing of the state. The public can be forgiven for being confused about a ‘voluntary sector’ that, according to a 2009 report for the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO), employs more than 600,000 people. The public might equally be puzzled by the plethora of ‘non-governmental’ organisations which require an Office of the Third Sector to preside over them.

Between 1997 and 2005, the combined income of Britain’s charities nearly doubled, from £19.8 billion to £37.9 billion, with the biggest growth coming in grants and contracts from government departments. According to the Centre for Policy Studies, state funding rose by 38 per cent in the first years of the twenty-first century while private donations rose by just seven per cent.

This surge in government spending coincided with a politicisation of the third sector which was actively encouraged by the state apparatus from the prime minister down. Traditionally, lobbying activity could not be a charity’s ‘dominant’ activity, but could only be ‘incidental or ancillary’ to its charitable purpose. In 2002, however, a report from the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit called for charities to increase their lobbying activity and for the Charity Commission guidelines to be made ‘less cautionary’: ‘Charities perform a valuable role in campaigning for social change. The guidelines on campaigning should be revised to encourage charities to play this role to the fullest extent.’

The Charity Commission duly revised its guidelines on campaigning two years later, allowing all non-party political campaigning in furtherance of a charity’s goals so long as this activity was not ‘the dominant method by which the organisation will pursue its apparently charitable objects’. A subsequent Cabinet Office report in 2007 called for the rules to be relaxed further still. Accepting that charities had ‘considerable latitude… for political campaigning under existing rules’, the authors expressed concern about the range of legal and regulatory restraints which ‘unjustifiably restricts political campaigning by third-sector organisations’. Stressing the right of charities ‘to undertake campaigns, regardless of any funding relationship with government’, the Cabinet Office argued that organisations whose purpose was wholly political should not be barred from charitable status: ‘Provided that the ultimate purpose remains demonstrably a charitable one, the government can see no objection, legal or other, to a charity pursuing that purpose wholly or mainly through political activities.’

There are still charities that do what most of us think of as “charity”, but far too many of them are just lobbying devices to accomplish political rather than charitable ends. There’s no reason to prevent organizations from political lobbying, but they should not benefit from the special tax status of genuine charities.

June 18, 2012

Who’s afraid of austerity?

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:17

At the BBC News website, Niall Ferguson on why young westerners should welcome austerity:

The heart of the matter is the way public debt allows the current generation of voters to live at the expense of those as yet too young to vote or as yet unborn.

In this regard, the statistics commonly cited as government debt are themselves deeply misleading, for they encompass only the sums owed by governments in the form of bonds.

The rapidly rising quantity of these bonds certainly implies a growing charge on those in employment, now and in the future, since — even if the current low rates of interest enjoyed by the biggest sovereign borrowers persist — the amount of money needed to service the debt must inexorably rise.

But the official debts in the form of bonds do not include the often far larger unfunded liabilities of welfare schemes like — to give the biggest American schemes — Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

The most recent estimate for the difference between the net present value of federal government liabilities and the net present value of future federal revenues is $200 trillion, nearly thirteen times the debt as stated by the U.S. Treasury.

Notice that these figures, too, are incomplete, since they omit the unfunded liabilities of state and local governments, which are estimated to be around $38 trillion.

These mind-boggling numbers represent nothing less than a vast claim by the generation currently retired or about to retire on their children and grandchildren, who are obligated by current law to find the money in the future, by submitting either to substantial increases in taxation or to drastic cuts in other forms of public expenditure.

[. . .]

It is surprisingly easy to win the support of young voters for policies that would ultimately make matters even worse for them, like maintaining defined benefit pensions for public employees.

If young Americans knew what was good for them, they would all be in the Tea Party.

A second problem is that today’s Western democracies now play such a large part in redistributing income that politicians who argue for cutting expenditures nearly always run into the well-organised opposition of one or both of two groups: recipients of public sector pay and recipients of government benefits.

June 17, 2012

Narrow specialization, but very wide assumed knowledge

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:11

Tim Worstall on the problem when specialists in one area pretend deep understanding of radically different areas:

Regular readers will know that I’m perfectly happy to take what the climate scientists tell me about climate science. Where I start to stray from the path of green orthodoxy is those same scientists then tell us the economics of what we ought to do about it all. Something they are not competent to comment upon as they really don’t understand the economics. I do accept the economics of climate change as laid out by the economists who have studied the economics of climate change. William Nordhaus, Nick Stern and so on, tell us that if the climate science is right then a simple revenue neutral carbon tax will be the solution.

That’s fine by me. But it does still puzzle me as to why the not economists feel competent to pronounce on the economics of climate change. Are they intellectual supermen who can master two widely different subjects? Simply succumbing to politics: something must be done, this is something, do this? [. . .]

Which leads us to our conclusion. The reason the scientists are so in conflict with what the economists of climate change are saying about the economics of climate change is simply that the scientists are entirely ignorant of what the economists are saying. And I’m afraid that, despite the popularity of the stance among politicians, ignorance is not a notably successful form of governance.

June 13, 2012

When is a bribe appropriate?

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Business, Law, Russia — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:59

The British government is trying to crack down on bribery, which on the surface seems like a good thing to do: but will it cripple British businesses in third world countries?

We used to draw a distinct line between what was acceptable business conduct here at home and what we did abroad with Johnny Foreigner.

Inviting Bertie from your major customer to Henley or the Derby, or waving Cup Final and Olympic tickets in his face was entirely acceptable. Slipping him £500 for an order was bribery and both illegal and immoral.

But what you did abroad was an entirely different matter: bribery was until very recently tax deductible.

[. . .]

This is of course very different from the system of old. Which was, essentially, that soft soaping someone with experiences and days out was just absolutely fine while any mention at all of cash was not just legally but also socially verboten.

At home, in Britain, that was. Having worked in some pretty odd and even rough places I’ve done my share of bribing people, but even so I would be profoundly shocked if I was asked for a bung in Blighty. But the system also most definitely facilitated the payment of bribes to Johnny Foreigner.

At one point, working in Russia, I needed to get cheap railway prices out of the Russian railroads to make the numbers on a metals shipment add up. The only way known to do this was to make a deal with the North Koreans who had special state-set prices on said railways. Which is how I found myself inside the N. Korean embassy in Moscow handing over $10,000 in crisp notes to their KGB-style guy after the successful conclusion of the shipment.

Yes, of course, it’s terribly naughty subverting the employees of a communist dictatorship, but the reaction here at home was the most interesting. When I made gentle enquiries to the taxman as to how I might account for this transaction, hinting gently at first, he finally pointed out that since I’d paid the bribe in a foreign currency to a foreign chap that was just fine. Just list it as a business expense and it was tax deductible.

QotD: “California is becoming Detroit”

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:14

The liberal model — borrowing huge sums, rigging interest and the currency to enable state profligacy, turning large swaths of the population into less productive unionized government workers or dependents on the dole who vote in thanks to political hacks — simply does not work. How could beautiful blue-state California lose almost a million refugees to arid Texas? I like Texas, but Dallas had far less of nature to work with than did San Francisco. (It takes a lot of human failure for thousands to give up verdant California to move to Utah or the Nevada desert.) What we are witnessing is nothing short of surreal: in the manner that Tijuana was a different universe from San Diego, so too the entire state of California is becoming a different world from its neighbors. Whether one examines its near dead-last schools, its oppressive income and sales taxes, its decaying roads and infrastructure, its absurd prison system, its dysfunctional state offices (try the DMV), or its priestly public employee caste, California is becoming Detroit.

Victor Davis Hanson, “The Liberal Super Nova”, PJ Media, 2012-06-11

June 3, 2012

Quebec case may force common-law couples into marriage

Filed under: Cancon, Law — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:00

An interesting development in Quebec’s laws relating to common-law relationships:

Somewhere in North America, there is a place where little girls don’t give the slightest thought to what kind of wedding dress they’ll wear one day. A place where young men have never heard the expression: “why buy the cow when you can have the milk for free?” — because the milk is always free. A place where no one asks an unmarried couple expecting a baby if they’re getting hitched.

This place is the province of Quebec. The French language spoken here is no guarantee for romance. Couples are practical, and lovers treasure their individuality. Quebec has become one of the least marrying places in the world, thanks to the institution known as “de facto spouses.” But now, thanks to a bizarre legal case entangling a Quebec billionaire and his de facto spouse, the freedom to un-marry is under threat. More than 1 million Quebecois in this kind of relationship may soon be automatically married by the state, against their will.

De facto spouses are defined by Quebec’s law as two people who have been living together for a year or more without being married and who check the “couple” box on their income tax statement form. Quebec’s lawmakers have deliberately chosen not to give de facto couples the same rights and responsibilities that married couples have under the Law of Quebec, to preserve the freedom of choice. Upon the termination of a relationship, “no matter how long cohabitation has lasted, de facto spouses have no legal support obligation to each other, even if one spouse is in need and the other has a high income.” Quebec is the only province in Canada where spousal support payments are not recognized by law for de facto spouses.

May 29, 2012

The fuzzy good intentions of equalization and the bad results

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:07

Peter Holle in the National Post, outlining the economic distortions of federal equalization payments in the recipient provinces:

Equalization, viewed critically, does no favours to either the funding or recipient provinces. After 50 years, outside transfers constitute an ever larger portion of the economies in have-not provinces. In an otherwise globally-oriented, market-driven world, Canada’s equalization program has encouraged the development of locally-oriented, public-sector driven economies.

Here are just a few ways that equalization provides incentives to harmful policy, stunting economic growth in the jurisdictions the policy means to help.

  • Inflating the public sector: Equalization has allowed recipient jurisdictions to create disproportionately larger public sectors because someone else is paying the bill. Manitoba’s public sector, for instance, employs 103 people per 1,000 residents, compared to a Canadian average of 84.
  • Politicizing spending. The external funding from equalization has allowed local politicians to build up vote-buying infrastructure with little political cost, by disconnecting taxation from benefit. Quebec’s $7-a-day daycare, and university tuition at less than half the Canadian average, would be unworkable without $7.4-billion in annual equalization subsidies from the rest of Canada.
  • Incentives for higher taxes. A path-breaking study by the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies showed that equalization rewards recipient provinces for imposing high and damaging tax rates, which deter private-sector investment and job creation. Manitoba, the only have-not province in Western Canada, has the highest income taxes in the region, and also has the lowest rate of private-sector investment.
  • Artificially inexpensive hydro power. By excluding the true value of renewable hydro energy revenues from the calculation of revenue capacity, the equalization formula rewards Manitoba and Quebec for charging artificially low domestic electricity prices. Below-market prices, in turn, encourage consumers to use more resources that otherwise would be conserved in response to accurate price signals.

May 20, 2012

This is why I don’t expect the Bush tax cut to be allowed to expire

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:42

Here it is in one easy-to-understand graph:

Brad Plumer explains:

What will the economy look like in 2013? A great deal depends on what Congress decides to do at the end of this year. Remember, the Bush tax cuts are expiring, the payroll tax holiday will sunset, and a bunch of new spending cuts under the debt-deal “sequester” are scheduled to kick in. Coming all at once, that’s a potentially big drag on growth.

[. . .]

To put this in perspective, the Federal Reserve expects the economy to grow at a roughly 2.9 percent pace in 2013. If Congress does nothing at the end of this year, much of that growth could be wiped out, and there’s a strong possibility that the United States could lurch back into recession. (Granted, a lot could depend on how the Fed reacts in this situation.)

On the flip side, as Ezra discussed in Thursday’s Wonkbook, letting all of the tax cuts expire and spending cuts kick in would also cut the U.S. deficit considerably: “Public debt falls from 75.8 percent in 2013 to 61.3 percent in 2022.”

H/T to Doug Mataconis for the link.

May 1, 2012

The morality of taxation

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:17

In the Telegraph, Philip Johnston recounts the story of the 10 beer-drinking men and uses it to discuss the morality of taxes. Although the details are British, the story applies equally to Canada or the United States:

No discussion of the morality of taxation can be divorced from what is done with the money. It is not enough to say we must all contribute according to our means without at the same time questioning where it all goes. Tax has become the new immigration: a taboo subject for politicians who fear being derided as friends of the rich or denounced for immoral policies.

Yet, even with the parlous state of the nation’s finances, an argument can be made for low taxation that speaks to both a desire for smaller government and for greater personal freedom. The last Labour government took too much in taxes not merely because it believed that ever-increasing amounts of public spending were the only way to achieve better services. It did so because socialists think they know best how to spend people’s money and should be entrusted to do so. That is the essence of the Left’s worldview; and it is the principal reason why the state has grown so much in the past 50 years.

Where is the morality in taking money from people so that politicians can feel good about themselves? How is it ethical of a government to remove 40 per cent of an individual’s income with the purpose of engineering society the way it sees fit, rather than ensuring that people have the means to get on, by and large, with their own lives? Our system of governance has become characterised by grotesque waste, unfulfilled promises, incompetent delivery and excessive red tape. It has over-reached itself and seems incapable of retrenching, even under a Tory prime minister.

The moral, and Conservative, case for lower taxes is that they allow people to make their own decisions, to save when they wish, to give if they choose and to spend on what matters to them. Tory politicians should not be ashamed to talk about cutting taxes, because high taxation removes the need for individuals to take responsibility for their own lives and heightens cynicism about the ability of the government to deliver.

April 25, 2012

Complaint submitted to CRA over the David Suzuki Foundation’s charitable status and partisan political activity

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:56

It’s been an open secret for years that some organizations with charitable status under the Canada Revenue Agency’s rules are stepping over the line with regard to partisan political activities. A complaint has been lodged with the CRA over the David Suzuki Foundation on these grounds:

The David Suzuki Foundation on Tuesday became the target of a complaint to the Canada Revenue Agency, just days after its namesake co-founder stepped down amid heightened tensions between environmental charities and the Conservative government.

EthicalOil.org, a non-profit organization that promotes oil from Canada and other democracies, sent a letter to the agency asking it to investigate whether the David Suzuki Foundation is breaking rules that pertain to political activity. Registered charities are allowed to devote only a small fraction of their resources to political activity, although they can never be partisan.

“If you find the Suzuki Foundation is in contravention of the CRA rules, then we request that you consider whether the Suzuki Foundation should have its charitable status revoked or otherwise be sanctioned,” EthicalOil.org said in its 44-page letter, which was drafted by Calgary-based JSS Barristers and obtained by the National Post.

April 20, 2012

The stadium issue for the Minnesota Vikings

Filed under: Economics, Football, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:40

It’s been a big issue in Minnesota for the entire off-season, but I haven’t been following too closely (not living in the state, I don’t know anything about the issue other than what the StarTribune and the Pioneer Press have been reporting, leavened with some angst and bile from the various Viking fan blogs).

In a nutshell, the Vikings have been playing at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome in Minneapolis for 30 years. Their lease on the building expired at the end of the 2011 season and they’ve been trying to get political support for a new stadium for the last ten years. The stadium debate has gone over the same ground repeatedly, but even when the site is agreed upon and the team and the city appear to be happy with the compromise, it still required the state to provide additional funding … lots of additional funding.

That’s where what appeared to be a done deal went off the rails earlier this week. The state legislature voted down the state’s share of the funding for the stadium, which appears to have been a rude surprise to both Minneapolis and the team.

The NFL is now warning Minnesota that the Vikings could move out of state (Los Angeles has been hoping for a team for years now, although given California’s dire financial straits, it’s hard to imagine them putting up any more money than Minnesota might be willing to offer).

As I wrote back in November,

The Vikings are hoping to get a new stadium built, and the state legislature has been doing what they can to kick the issue down the road every time it’s come up. I don’t have a say in the matter, as I’m not located in Minnesota and I’d probably still cheer for the team even if it moved elsewhere (though it would be a sad thing to see it move after half a century in Minnesota).

In general, I don’t think governments should build stadiums for professional sports teams, as it’s using tax money to subsidize private profits. If a new stadium is going to generate a profit, the team’s ownership should bear the costs themselves. The fact that they generally don’t — mostly because politicians don’t want to deal with angry sports fans after the team leaves town — doesn’t make it right.

It is quite noteworthy that the question has never actually been asked of the voters — the folks whose taxes will have to subsidize the team’s new stadium — if they are willing to pay. I have to assume that this is because they have indicated in other ways that they are not willing. If that’s the case (and I can’t blame them in the slightest if that’s true), then the Vikings should either pony up enough money to build a stadium without taxpayer assistance, or go looking for a city or a state foolish enough to pour more money into the pockets of the team’s ownership. Here once again are Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch on why public funding for professional sports facilities are a bad idea:

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