A Wall Street Journal editorial details the folly of the states of Illinois and Indiana engaging in a bidding war to see who can throw more taxpayer money at the Chicago Bears for a new billion-dollar-plus football stadium.
But as The Journal reminds (as has the Allegheny Institute scores of times over the past 30 years): “[T]he reality of big stadium deals is that, despite promises of economic gains, taxpayers often get sacked.”
Continues The Journal:
“’Nearly all empirical studies find little to no tangible impacts of sports teams and facilities on local economic activity,’ says a 2022 review of decades of research. ‘The level of venue subsidies typically provided far exceeds any observed economic benefit.’
“In other words, the short-term loser of this Bears stadium playoff might really be the long-term winner,” The Journal wryly concludes.
As we are wont to say, faced with such lucidity, remember this when the Pirates and Steelers yet again come hat in hand seeking major multimillion-dollar improvements at PNC Park and Acrisure Stadium.
And come they will, with negotiations already, reportedly, going on behind closed doors.
The dedicated denizens of demographic dissection are tut, tut, tutting yet again that if only Greater Pittsburgh had more immigrants, by garsh, by golly, Pittsburgh would be a growing mega-metropolis where, as Garrison Keillor used to say, “all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking and all the children are above average.”
The latest exercise in shibboleth-shoveling comes with the latest U.S. Census data showing Pittsburgh’s population continues to shrink. While deaths kept outpacing births in the period from July 2024 through 2025, out-migration still topped international migration by about 200 souls.
Additionally, the numbers-crunchers blame the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration for tamping down immigration overall, in Pittsburgh and elsewhere.
But, conveniently, too few of the tut-tutters (if any) – except the Allegheny Institute – mention the many elephants in the room that, gee, might have potential migrants, domestic and foreign, passing on Pittsburgh.
Let’s see…
There’s the long flat-lining Pittsburgh Public Schools that feature embarrassingly low academic chops for extraordinarily high costs.
Then there’s the heavy cudgel of, and government fealty to, organized labor that raises, typically by double-digit percentages, the cost of public works projects.
Enter a property reassessment system so broken – and unconstitutional – that it makes would-be residents and prospective businesses think twice about relocating here.
Let’s not forget the repeated taxpayer subsidies to projects crowned as “winners” by government’s command economists, projects that often, predictably, fail.
Of course, real progress in Greater Pittsburgh regularly has been choked off by one-party political rule.
Oh…
And weren’t new professional sports fields, stadiums and arenas (not to forget a new convention center and the North Shore Connector subway/trolley line) supposed to lay the foundation for a wonderful new “renaissance” 30 years ago? (Get ready, class, the same crowd is about to extend its losing streak with a heavily publicly subsidized convention center hotel.)
Gee whiz, too, handing the Penguins exclusive development rights to the old Civic Arena site really worked out well, eh?
But now, if we can just attract more immigrants, we’ll be good to go, right?
After all these decades, reasonable people would think that all the “experts” with holes in their heads would have run out of mush to pour from those holes.
Guess we’ve just been expecting too much of our “leaders” who would far better serve Greater Pittsburgh’s economic and population fortunes by killing the central planning, lowering high taxes and reducing onerous regulations and halting taxpayer subsidies to government’s chosen “winners” (that too often prove to be rank losers) while letting the open and free marketplace do what it does best.
And if all the movers and shakers, in both government and the private sector, can’t get with that program, they should be removed from the rigged program that they work so assiduously to preserve.
That Pittsburgh continues to have so many unlearned lessons from the trenches is embarrassing — and a tragedy.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitue.org).
