Should stadiums and arenas be publicly financed?

No. Sports are an entertainment, not a required part of society. And while they may be fun to play, and lucrative for some, they remain dangerous and counterintuitive to our fragile bodies. The main stream media and the public brain trust, for instance, have finally realized that football players get concussions from using their heads on one another like rams do out in the wild. I suppose it had never dawned on them for some sixty + years that when two opposing people's heads collide that something is going on inside their skull. So no, no public funding.

TOJ said:

If you are not a taxpayer of that jurisdiction, why is it any of your business?

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because the state is trying to gut public schools via vouchers and funding cuts ($300 million dollar cut a few years back,) yet can drop more than $700 million into a new building for people to throw balls around in. as a citizen of my state, i have a right to be pissed off by that. i'd be even more pissed if i lived closer to the capital, which may eventually happen because that's where the jobs are.

as i previously stated, though, i've accepted that people are willing to devote large amounts of tax money to ball throwing. i don't agree with it, but that's democracy.

Consider that the first publicly funded pro sports stadium was Milwaukee's County Stadium, and that it wasn't built until the early 1950s, it's obvious that pro sport leagues and teams were able to thrive just fine without public financing. They take advantage of it now because they can, because we're a bunch of suckers, not because they have to.

Also, once they started building stadiums to be more durable in the 1910s and 1920s, they commonly lasted for 60+ years. Every possible cent was wrung out of them. Now, it's not uncommon for a stadium to be deemed unsuitable in half that time, and the reasons have to do with trendiness, not lack of functionality. But hey, when you've got some sucker paying for it, why not, eh?

The term "taking advantage" still applies, but in a different context.

Jango said:

No. Sports are an entertainment, not a required part of society.

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We have 40-50,000 years of evidence of musical instruments that say otherwise - and most likely several tens of thousands of years of wooden instruments that haven't survived to be found. Entertainment is a basic part of our nature. Whether it's music, dance, theater, or sports doesn't matter.