Taxpayer Subsidized Football

From the excellent Coyote Blog comes a post about Arizonan public officials eager to subsidize the Super Bowl. Here's part:

From a reader comes this story of Arizona looking to the public trough to get funds to lure another SuperBowl. I can say from experience now that Superbowl week is made up mostly of private corporate and celebrity parties that the unwashed locals like myself are either a) not allowed to attend at all or b) can attend only by ponying up $1000 or more. Not being resentful or a leftist, I couldn't really care less about the parties being near by. However, my opinion changes real fast if my tax dollars are required to pay for them:

Super Bowl organizers will try to nail down another big game for Arizona, possibly as early as 2012.

But for the state to stay competitive, taxpayers need to shoulder the majority of game costs, organizers say. And the organizers plan to lobby for legislation to accomplish that.

The weeklong celebration culminating with Sunday's Super Bowl XLII cost the local Host Committee about $17 million. The private sector, including such big contributors as the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation and the Thunderbirds, bankrolled more than 80 percent, while state and local agencies chipped in the balance.

But with a slumping economy making fundraising a challenge, the Arizona Super Bowl Host Committee, the Arizona Cardinals organization and Valley business leaders want see that ratio reversed, with public dollars financing the bulk of the effort.

Don't you love the last sentence? An exactly equivalent way to state this is "people have other priorities for their own money and refuse to give it up voluntarily, particularly in difficult economic times, so we need the state to take it by force."

And we wonder why the government wastes so much of our money.