NFL star Richard Sherman: Stop forcing tax payers to cover the cost of billionaires' stadiums.
Seattle's star cornerback, Richard Sherman, has announced a potential independent bid for president with a central tenet: stop making taxpayers cover the cost of billionaires' stadiums.
“I’d get us out of this deficit,” Sherman said. “I’d stop spending billions of taxpayer dollars on stadiums and probably get us out of debt and maybe make the billionaires who actually benefit from the stadiums pay for them. That kind of seems like a system that would work for me.”
Is his plan short-sighted? Maybe.
In fact, Seattle's recent CenturyLink Field cost $560 million; the taxpayers on the hook to cover $390 million of it, paying until 2021. This, despite the fact that team owner Paul Allen is the 45th richest man in the world, worth $17 billion, and will be the primary beneficiary of the profits brought in through the stadium.
Obama tried to force a change on this issue earlier in 2015, proposing that federal taxes should no longer pay for these private stadiums. the proposal did not pass through congress.
Though it seems like a joke, it's not. Sucking tax payers' money away to cover private business cost, some may say, is abhorable.
It may be too late for Sherman to get much traction this election cycle, though, for the record, he would run as an Independent with the slogan “Make America The Place You Want To Raise Your Kids."