How to brew a boondoggle
Plus: introducing Fingers' Regulatory Roulette!
Editor’s note: I wanted to run this piece earlier in the week, but I’ve been under the weather here at Fingers HQ. Thanks as always for your patience, love you, mean it.—Dave.
Walter Hickey had a great Numlock News interview this past weekend with Boondoggle’s Pat Garofalo about the frustratingly resilient “sports subsidy industrial complex,” in which municipalities throw buckets of taxpayer dollars for new stadiums at for-profit pro sports teams under the easily disproven premise that this will “create jobs” or whatever. As Garofalo, who wrote a whole book about this style of ill-advised, costly public-private deal, put it (emphasis mine):
When you're in the corporate subsidies, anti-monopoly, taking on these big, entrenched powers, it's not really red, blue, D/R, left, right; it's elite and not, and the businesses that have managed to lock themselves into being dominant through the political process, and then the businesses that haven't done that, and therefore can't compete.
We talk a lot about how corporations launder economic capital into political capital here at Fingers, so it should come as no surprise that major firms (pro sports teams, Amazon, etc.) are able to win themselves sweetheart deals from unelected “regional economic development committees”1 and middling politicians on the take in both parties. But you rarely see even large craft breweries on the receiving end of substantial public largesse, which is why the situation currently unfolding around Diageo’s soon-to-shutter Guinness facility in Baltimore County caught my eye.