Secrets of the City

Peppering downtown with 81 visits per year only leads to traffic headaches during the workweek, those visitors aren’t spending much money, and on top of that, baseball is BORING. I say let the Twins go.

The Wild can go, too, but they’re over in St. Paul so I don’t really care.

Minneapolis should be trying for the Vikings stadium deal. That’s the event that will bring in 60,000 people 10 times a year at OFF PEAK times, with people who have the cash to spend no less than $30/ticket and almost as much just to park their cars. Who doesn’t want to own *that* ramp?

Speaking of math, I’ll be buying a Powerball ticket today. The odds are long, but the potential return is pretty damn good. I lose more pocket change than I spend on Powerball, and a lot of people put significantly more money into dead-end business investments.

Before you buy that Powerball ticket you should read up on Expected Value. You may find that saving those dollars for your own dead-end business is a better idea. Personally I would rather give $0.03 cents of every $20 I spend to the proposed Twins stadium tax.

Bringing 27,000 people to downtown 81 times vs. bringing 60,000 people 10 times. Point Twins.

Every major league baseball team plays on Friday, Saturday and Sundey (”off peak” times). Point Twins.

I propose that all state lottery profits go towards the teaching of math. That way, when the lotto stops making money, we’ll know it’s working. And the same method could be used to get rid of Vikings fans.

Amen Joel.

In two plus years living here I’ve never gone to downtown for anything other than a Twins game. No bars, no eats, no shopping. Nothing. So downtown wouldn’t lose anything economically if there were no more Twins games, at least not from me.

But like Matt said, you can’t take 20-40,000 people out of downtown 81 times a year and expect to not feel an economic impact. As I’m walking to or from the bus when I go to games I see all kinds of people in Twins outfits in restaurants and carrying big shopping bags. And what about the hotels? I know from not growing up here that lots of people come in from outstate for a weekend. Without the Twins that all just dries up, no one is going to come to shop at Marshall Field’s or buy a book at Borders for the weekend. Maybe they’ll spend the money somewhere else, maybe they won’t. But asking me to believe that you can remove the Twins and not suffer an economic impact is asking me to disbelieve my own observations.

Mike Meyers’ worthless articles are taxing on my brain. Thank you for informing us of nothing. Sure, sure the stats about the lottery becoming harder to win and the payout being spread out over more time makes the present value lower are interesting (wow, you took principles of econ too!). But, seriously trying to do an economic analysis on someone’s decision to buy a ticket? “appeal of the game is recreation, not investment.” – No really? I was planning on dropping my 401k and putting it into lottery tickets because I’m too stupid to figure out the math.

The very thing that makes a city major league is baseball. Football revenue is all on tv. Baseball is the one game that, locally, relies mostly on its fan base to come to the games. And, as previously noted, the Pohlads make a significant contribution to the causes of these cities, which is more than you can say for the Red raider who made off with hundreds of millions and laughed his purple pride ass off all the way back to Texas. Let the Vikings move to LA. Keep the Twins.

One more thing, if there’s anything that should be clear by now, corporate subsidies are a way of life in Minnesota and the whole damn country, e.g. Target, Lawson, Best Buy, just to name a few. Those are our tax dollars, too, and we didn’t get to vote on that, did we?

Ever wonder why we all think politicians are crooked, then continue to vote for the same ones over and over? Beats me, too.

One more thing: has anyone asked Heffelfinger why he’s stepping down? Is it because he’s an honest guy doing the best job he can while working for political slime like Gonzales? Just wondering…

Once again we have a genuis who can’t leave politics out of anything. Thanks, slim. Hopefully this good thread doesn’t go widly off track like yesterday’s did.

I heard the Heffelfinger thing this morning, and it struck me as pretty odd.

He said that he was stepping down for “very personal, very important family financial reasons” (this is not actually a quote, but pretty much how I remember it).

Anybody have an idea how much the US Attorney pulls down? I mean, sure, he’s going to get a huge raise going into private practice, but really…

A guys got to feed his family, but does his wife have a smack habit he needs to support?

“A guys got to feed his family, but does his wife have a smack habit he needs to support?”

I cost a lot on money to feed a family these days, just ask Spreewell.

If the Twins and Vikings can’t make enough money to stay in town with the revenue they get from their businesses, let them go somewhere they can succeed.

It’s a market economy — why have the government propping them up? Jobs? Come on. That means that professional sports is a make-work welfare program.

Let them fail here and go somewhere else. Let the market work.

Ok, the Supreme Court justices make less than $200K, so I’m guessing Heffelfinger makes something short of that. The the pay for a partner in a big Twin Cities law firm is well over $500K for someone of Heffelfinger’s qualifications. Before taking the US Attorney job, Heffelfinger was a partner at Best and Flanagan.

As much as I’m a free market conservative, it is obvious that a lot of our businesses wouldn’t be here if not for government interaction. It’s a fact of life in our country that we will always prop up the ag industry, public transit, and others while going out of our way keep our biggest employers. It sucks, bad that’s just how it is. Kind of like having herpes (not that I would know).

Contrary to some peoples beliefs, the United States does not have a pure market economy. We have a mixed economy, and Kevin has provided some great examples of this. To add to them, other cities/counties/states have partly funded their professional sports stadiums because they end up benefiting from it in the end.

OK, so say it’s $150,000.

Now that’s not Sprewell money, but you’d think that you could eat Ramen once in a while and find a way to manage.

I guess that my point is that it seems weird that this is the reason that you’d give for resigning, especially since he sounds so dire when you hear him say it.

MunsingW, the PiPress reported it at 143K — and I’m with you; when I read the story this morning, it struck me as a bit odd. Doesn’t seem like the full story. Or then again, maybe they turned down his request for a raise and he just said “fine, I’m outta here”.