Originally Posted by: Nonstopdrivel 
To the contrary, it is 100 percent reasonable and in fact should be a firm prerequisite to purchasing an NFL franchise. If you can't fund your own stadium, tough: you either live without or you don't receive the franchise.
The reason why these team owners ask for state funds is because they know full well that the return on investment is abysmal on these things -- below the rate of inflation. It is a form of fraud as far as I am concerned. These men won't invest their own money, and they can't find any private investors to finance their projects, because they are fully aware what an irresponsible, counterproductive use of the money it is; so they foist it off on gullible taxpayers. What so many fans fail to grasp is that sports teams are nothing more than extravagantly expensive, low-profit-margin hobbies for billionaires. A couple of years ago they leaked the Cowboys' profit/loss statements. That team netted a deplorable $10 million on a nearly $1 billion annual budget. In any other industry, that would be grounds for immediate termination of -- at the very least -- the CEO. It would probably result in a whole-scale bloodletting among the executives.
It gets worse. For all the talk about the taxpayers getting back their investment, a significant proportion of stadiums -- in all sports -- are shuttered before the mortgages are even paid off. Not only do these stadiums not turn a profit, they don't even break even. It is almost impossible to fill them with events other than games (if they even sell out for the games), and the rest of the time they sit empty, a fixed cost that returns no revenue. There is a reason why most civic centers and arenas are owned by municipalities: no private corporation is silly enough to build and maintain one. It requires the coercive power of government to get them built.
And yes, all of this applies to the Green Bay Packers too. The reason why they resorted to their bogus novelty stock sale was because obtaining other sorts of funding was impossible or unreasonably expensive. So they settled on handing out worthless trinkets with no cash value in exchange for donations. I actually have no problem with this. In my opinion, if you aren't willing to risk your own money, you can't fool a private investor into funding your project, and you can't even cajole your fans into making donations to the building fund, you have no business compelling millions of taxpayers, many of whom may have no interest in your team whatsoever, to cough up the cash for you. At least the Packers had the integrity (this time, anyway) to limit the damage to people with an active rooting interest in the team. I still think the people of Brown County were silly for letting themselves get taxed in exchange for tickets only 8000 of them will be able to win.
Exactly. Why would we, taxpayers, expect a owner to build something that A) he most likely isn't liquid enough to afford and B) knows it will put him in the meat-grinder financially? Especially when the norm in this instance is public funds almost always go towards these castles. This is what I meant by reasonable, and Wade is probably right, realistic would maybe be the better term.
Lets not forget supply and demand here.. The NFL is a hot ticket and there are many markets that want a franchise. I would be interested to see how much public money from those markets would go towards a new stadium? Obviously MN 'leaders' (and I use that term loosely) don't want an NFL franchise, or at least take that 'privilege' for granted.
And of course, we are talking in broad generalizations. In this case, there wasn't much, if any, general fund public money going towards a new stadium. Gambling profit percentages and reworking a current MPLS tax were the 'public' money being asked for.
I agree with your last paragraph 100%, though. Sports memorabilia tax statewide would be the ideal tax/public money for the stadium. It taxes those vistors from out of state/country and it taxes those who choose to be taxed and those that would care for the team as you already said. But, alas, this is the MN legislature we are talking about here.