Moore: A Ballfield is the Priority?
Monday, September 18, 2017
Any responsible adult who budgets his or her money realizes the difference between necessities and things that are merely nice to have. Helping the downtrodden and fixing our infrastructure are necessities.
New baseball stadiums are things that seem like they’d be nice to have. (If it even philosophically justifiable to pay for something like that, even when money is flush.)
Let’s face it: eventually, the state is just going to run out of money to hand out. So we’re going to have to prioritize.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTDo we want to spend our resources fixing our infrastructure and helping poor people? Or, are we going to just continue our focus on corporate welfare? Would we rather bail out the multi-millionaires who thought it would be fun to buy a Triple-A professional baseball team instead of fixing real problems?
Put me in the category of people who believe that we’re better off prioritizing infrastructure and helping those in poverty instead of helping the wealthy get richer.
Priorities
Doesn’t anyone else besides me find it rather discouraging that GoLocal reported this week that the state needs to spend roughly $2.2 billion to address the deficiencies in our public schools?
Furthermore, GoLocal also reported that there are about 35,000 children in our state living in poverty. In this day and age, with us being a first world country, there should be no children forced to grow up in poverty.
And, if we allow that disgrace to take place, we shouldn’t be handing over $38 dollars of taxpayer money, that could be used to address this injustice, to wealthy folks who bought a baseball team for kicks.
Let’s not forget: our roads and bridges are falling apart, so we’ve begun a program to start tolling commercial trucks in order to help pay the costs of addressing this problem.
To top it all off, we have out-year budget deficits as far as the eye can see.
Things Fall Apart
Yet despite all of these problems, which will take money to address, the state is inching towards handing the owners of the Pawtucket Red Sox $38 million to construct a new stadium in Pawtucket.
Meanwhile, Pawtucket state senator Donna Nesselbush, supposedly a political liberal, apparently takes her economic education from the movie Field of Dreams, since she barked “if you build it, they will come”, into the microphone. I suppose the movie is a good reference point because anyone thinks that the deal will somehow benefit the taxpayers, they’re certainly dreaming. Does Nesselbush even realize she was quoting a line from a fairytale? The irony shouldn’t be lost on us.
A more sensible approach comes from former Hasbro CEO Alan Hassenfeld deserves credit for calling on the team’s owners to open up their books to the public to reveal both their expenses and revenues. Since the team is basically asking the state to act like a venture capital firm and put money up so that they may profit, his request is entirely rational. Taxpayers deserve to have access to all of the information since we’re about to become quasi-partners.
In any event, our leaders need to realize that we cannot do it all. We need to make tough decisions. That means putting our neediest and infrastructure before things that might be nice to have, but aren’t necessities.
We're not rich. So why should we be giving our money to rich people?
Russell J. Moore has worked on both sides of the desk in Rhode Island media, both for newspapers and on political campaigns. Send him an email at [email protected]. Follow him on twitter @russmoore713.
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