Quote:
Originally Posted by Bluenote
It's funny how you people complain about the chip mans.
1- no chipmans would be no jets
2- you all claimed at one time we would never get an nhl team
3- who cares about beer. I don't. I actually cannot stand drunk idiots spilling their beer on me. I go to watch Hockey. This isn't a bomber game where you have to drown your sorrows with booze.
4- get over it all ready !!! The amount of money the chipmans have dumped into this is astounding. And I can see lots and lots of other places that do nothing for this city that get tax subsidies. Maybe one of you rich talkers can step up and take over ? Thought not.
Back to talking about the JETS please
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This Bluenote guy is why we can't have nice things. His intellect doesn't comprehend the meandering ways in which the citizenry is giving up many opportunities for
actual improvements to our city, so he thinks a few professional athletes improve our city.
I'm going to explain this once and for all. There's almost no net benefit to the Jets being here at all. Not economically, anyhow. There will be a few more dollars coming in from people in Thunder Bay and Kenora and Brandon when they come to watch a game, but there's no much more than that. There's barely even a walk up crowd, so you're getting almost the same crowd game in and game out. And even if you aren't, it's irrelevant; there's very little economic impact whatsoever.
People can't grasp the concept that unless you're able to bring lots of money from outside your existing economy, it's mostly a zero-sum game. Money spent on a Jets game is money not spent elsewhere. In fact, because the Jets are such an expensive proposition, it could very easily be argued that they're
detrimental to the broader economy. Every time somebody pays $10 for a monster hotdog, that is $10 they aren't spending elsewhere. Every time they pay $180 to sit in P1, that's $180 they aren't spending elsewhere. And in a city like Winnipeg, $180 goes a long way. That could be spread over 4 dinners for 2 people in 4 different restaurants. And given that nobody goes alone, you'd may as well double that number. And since the margin on all of this is ridiculously high, the argument that you're putting a few 20 year olds filling beer cups and handing out nachos doesn't fly. Most of that money is rolling up into the Chipman or Thomson coffers only to make it's way into the pockets of multi-million dollar athletes, about three of which actually own homes here. The lion's share of that money is disappearing out of province, irrespective of the taxation on it. And the team didn't grow that much. We used to have the Moose here, don't forget, and they required a lot of the same people.
And when you start adding back all of the subsidies - for the Jets, for the SHED, etc... - the Chipman family is really not doing much at all. Nearly every tenant in CentrePoint is leaving behind a vacancy. If they managed to land MLCC, they'll be leaving behind an entire building. There is no marginal economic benefit to this at all. None. In fact, because SoPo will be subsidized using TIF in the SHED, there will be
negative economic benefit to this because nobody is going to see a dime of property tax for 20 years on that building while costing us the existing taxation revenue from the building in St. James.
So, yeah. If anybody wants to pretend the Jets are beneficial to the city, they need to understand the reality of those claims. The Winnipeg Jets are a toy. They are not an economic engine. If you want to spend your money with them, be my guest. But unless you're living in Kenora and coming in for every game, that's just discretionary money that's not be spent elsewhere.
The only argument against this is whether that money was going to be saved versus spent. And that's very dubious given that it's very rare that a binary relationship exists between being conservative or frivolously blowing money like one does in the MTS Centre on a regular basis.
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