Agitator Friend Skip Oliva finally got his Steve Czaban show slot tonight. It was too short, but made for good radio. Skip did a pretty good job restraining his impatience. Czaban was polite but kept having to fall back on arguments we might justly characterize as - “lame.” (e.g. If these things are such bad deals why do cities keep doing them?) The general trend was “What about - ?” “No, because - ” “I take your point. But what about - ?” “No, because - ” “Sorry. Out of time.” You could tell some of Skip’s points got through, such as Skip’s point that the gross receipts tax on “the City’s largest businesses” will fall on a lot of medical practices, possibly driving some from the City.

Ironically, the Fox-mandated commercial break shorted the segment in such a way that Skip got to make his best points (by my count) while Czaban lacked the time to press his own: that while stadium development may indeed represent simply a shift of business from “Column A to Column B” as Skip put it, in this particular case, “Column A” is Virginia and Maryland and Column B is the District. From the perspective of the DC Government, and at least some of its citizens and businesses, it’s a potentially profitable raid on the income of other jurisdictions. My own response to this would be twofold: it doesn’t answer the arguments from justice; and after the taxes on tickets and parking it’s far from clear how much extra suburbanites will budget for dropping on stadium-proximity businesses.

Skip did have time to make a very clear statement of the arguments from justice: The gross receipts tax takes money by force from some businesses to hand over to (in almost all cases) larger businesses; to the extent that the stadium does draw new businesses and diverts commerce from, say, Georgetown to Anacostia, the City government is forcing some businesses to subsidize their competition. (Even taxing Arena Stage to fund the stadium represents forcing Arena Stage to subsidize competition for local entertainment dollars.)

Narcissistic highlight: Your correspondent was referred to, though not by name. I was “another e-mailer” who challenged Czaban on his libertarianism. Won’t replace a link from Daze Reader (probably not work safe!) as a traffic generator, but a guilty pleasure nonetheless.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 22nd, 2004 at 9:53 pm by Mystery Man and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.