- Sam Allard / Scene
“Deciding whether to vote for Issue 7…should not be a difficult decision,” opines the Northeast Ohio Media Group’s editorial board in its Sin Tax endorsement Friday morning. “Nobody likes to pay taxes, but this is about as painless as any tax could be.”
It’s not like the official thumbs up comes as a shock. In January, the NEOMG was already insisting that the Sin Tax was necessary for the upkeep of Cleveland’s three downtown sports facilities, even as the editorial board acknowledged that the corporate folks who made promises back in the 90s never followed through.
“The original sin tax was passed in 1990 with the promise of some 28,000 jobs to be created in the Gateway District,” the editorial board wrote on January 25. “But those projections were predicated on the development of office buildings that never materialized, GCP President Joe Roman now says.”
Well darn.
The NEOMG wrote that though the current Sin Tax has nothing to do with creating jobs or positively affecting Northeast Ohio taxpayers in any tangible way — it’s literally about the obligations demarcated on a truly shitty lease — Issue 7 is still the best way to “remind team owners that this town desperately wants a champion much more than it yearns for a cool fan experience.”
That’s a logic Scene’s having a hard time fully understanding. We too, desperately want a champion much more than we want a cool fan experience, particularly when “fan experience” is a term owners love to use when they’re talking about things like scoreboards, to generate beaucoup advertising dollars (of which Cleveland won’t see a penny) as opposed to the fans themselves, who as a rule hate obtrusive advertisements.
For reference, the proposed upgrades for the scoreboards at Progressive Field and Quicken Loans arena — $23.9 million — cost more than the entire construction of Classic Park in Lake County, home of the Captains.
“We can rail all we want about the wealthy people who own the three teams, but the fact is a lease is a lease and these improvements must be made,” writes the NEOMG editorial board, which hasn’t roused itself to rail against the wealthy owners at all.
This article appears in Apr 16-22, 2014.
This issue is the absurdity of absurdities. Let me get this straight: the purpose of the Sin Tax is to gouge those who purchase alcohol and cigarettes not because anyone is trying to discourage consumption but rather so the County can use that money to pay for sports stadiums that do not produce anything but a fleeting moment witnessing the passing of a football, the dribbling of a basketball and the throwing of a baseball so that such a minute tidbit of diversion can be enjoyed by all. The stupidity of this proposition is enough to make your head spin even though the spin doctors advocating passage of this nonsense are already doing a pretty good job of hypnotizing the voters to actually consider supporting it. At least the Robber Barons of the previous centuries provided something tangible such as oil, steel, railroads etcetera. These team owners do not even provide one tangible thing that could ever be considered with the term “value added.” Almost everyone discusses this “enterprise” as though it is the same thing as industry {which it is not}. The price of admission is essentially a voluntary tax paid by those who can afford it to pay those who don’t need it. If this isn’t a transfer of wealth I don’t know what is.
The real outrage here is the fact that taxes on alcohol and cigarettes will not be used to aid in the reduction of addiction {hence the reference to “sin”} but rather to stuff the pockets of all three teams who could easily afford to pay for the repairs themselves. The vote was rammed through the last time {under somewhat suspicious circumstances} and hear we go again. But this time…not so fast!!! We the voters of Cuyahoga County are going to fight the proponents on this one and we don’t care if the teams up and go somewhere else {please see my views on entertainment below} because quite frankly there are simply more important things than sports and the unearned money that comes with it. Those in public office who are too stupid and lazy to find other ways to grow a major American city need to resign and leave their self-seeking political ambitions on the scrapheap of history. Don’t ever let it be said that this was time when the tide ran out on Cuyahoga County but rather was the time when the voters rose up to welcome the rising tide of change and rebuked this pathetic paradigm our previous elected leaders embraced. Let the battle be joined.
And now to the real underlying issue at hand:
One of the most disturbing facts about our capitalist nation is the misappropriation of funds directed to the salaries of entertainers. Everyone should agree that the value an athlete, movie star, talk-show host, team-owner, etcetera brings to the average citizen is very small. Granted, they do offer a minuscule of diversion from our daily trials and tribulations as did the jesters in the king’s court during the middle ages. But to allow these entertainers to horde such great amounts of wealth at the expense of more benevolent societal programs is unacceptable. They do not provide a product or a service so why are they rewarded as such?
Our society is also subjected to the “profound wisdom” of these people because it equates wealth with influence. Perhaps a solution to this problem and a alternative to defeated school levies, crumbling infrastructures, as well as all the programs established to help feed, clothe and shelter those who cannot help themselves would be to tax this undeserved wealth. Entertainers could keep 1% of the gross earnings reaped from their endeavor and 99% could be deposited into the public coffers.
The old ideas of the redistribution of wealth have failed, and it is time to adapt to modern-day preferences. People put their money into entertainment above everything else; isn’t it time to tap that wealth? Does anyone think this will reduce the quality of entertainment? It seems to me that when entertainers received less income, the quality was much higher.
This has to be a typo.
Ah, the Plain Dealer editorial board: where the solution to every problem is to spend more, and the response to every tax suggested is applause. Sadly, in the real world, money is finite and needs and wants must be prioritized.
Like many, I do not choose to place the well-being of billionaires at the top of my list, so I voted (early) against this tax.
I wish I could “like” Joe Bialek’s comment more than once.
I love how the public is told that “we” own these stadiums that “our” teams play in. See, that’s really funny, because all it seems like the sports teams do is take take take. But hey, skating in on broken promises, shattered dreams, and jobs that were “supposed to be created” but just happened to not be, is another chance for the taxpayers of Cleveland to renew the horrible rip-off of a lease that was probably signed only after a whole bunch of “donations” and “upgrades to personal housing” were completed. But sure, we should vote yes on this, because the only thing better than a horrible mistake in the past is repeating that mistake!
The only thing sadder than the above is the castrated NEOMG Editorial Board giving this a thumbs up. Gilbert, Dolan, and Haslem have their hands so far up the NEOMG EB’s asses it’s not even funny. But smile, wave, and dance, happy puppets, smile, wave, and dance for the people.
after the announcement press conference was over, Haslem, Dolan, and Gilbert bent the NEOMG Editorial Board over the podium and all took turns taking them to pound town.