Wednesday, January 18, 2006
No Benefits Stories
As predictable as night follows day, when there is a special event in Pittsburgh such as a playoff game, there will be stories about the economic benefits to the City arising out of hosting the event. Restaurants, hotels, and novelty producers will be interviewed to tell us how much business they are doing because of the special occasion. Experts will talk about multipliers to explain the millions of dollars in economic activity the City will experience.
Now that the Steelers are on the road for the third straight week one would have thought that it at least one media outlet would have noticed that large numbers of Pittsburghers have been traveling to other cities and leaving substantial sums of money in those towns. Must be millions of bucks being drained from the local area.
All this is by way of pointing out that the seemingly mandatory stories about benefits of one-off events are overblown. No one really believes that they make any real difference to the local economy. On the other hand some growth in permanent, full-time jobs that pay significant salaries and that do not require heavy taxpayer subsidies would be a really important story. Wouldn’t it be nice to be reading about those jobs?
As predictable as night follows day, when there is a special event in Pittsburgh such as a playoff game, there will be stories about the economic benefits to the City arising out of hosting the event. Restaurants, hotels, and novelty producers will be interviewed to tell us how much business they are doing because of the special occasion. Experts will talk about multipliers to explain the millions of dollars in economic activity the City will experience.
Now that the Steelers are on the road for the third straight week one would have thought that it at least one media outlet would have noticed that large numbers of Pittsburghers have been traveling to other cities and leaving substantial sums of money in those towns. Must be millions of bucks being drained from the local area.
All this is by way of pointing out that the seemingly mandatory stories about benefits of one-off events are overblown. No one really believes that they make any real difference to the local economy. On the other hand some growth in permanent, full-time jobs that pay significant salaries and that do not require heavy taxpayer subsidies would be a really important story. Wouldn’t it be nice to be reading about those jobs?
