Rings of Fire
IT ALL BOILS DOWN to one simple thing: The 2012 Olympics are already a very complicated and very ugly affair.
The pro-stadium television ads, the ones with the fireman, aren't about the potential economic benefits of the development. They're about the Olympics. (Check out the web address at the bottom of the screen.)
And the mayor's sniveling public feud with Madison Square Garden and Cablevision isn't about tax breaks or their opposition to the stadium plan. It's about? well, you know.
Once again, the mayor has become so monomaniacal about some idiotic plan that he's been reduced to making insane accusations (Madison Square Garden is conspiring to keep the Olympics out of New York!) and threats (Want to lose your tax breaks?) against anyone who disagrees with him.
And as usual, once he gets this way, he stops making sense. MSG gets $11.7 million in tax breaks every year, in part, at least, for all the other business the Garden brings to New York. In suggesting they give up those breaks, the mayor hinted that the city could use that money to "help provide a raise for some of our municipal workers."
Sure, that money probably could be used to give city workers a much-needed raise. But to be honest, that annual $11.7 million wouldn't go very far once you started dividing it up. Any raises you got out of it would be pretty chintzy. But hey-that $600 million, why that's about 50 years' worth of MSG tax breaks right there! Imagine the kind of swell raises he could give with that, instead of pouring it into this boondoggle of a stadium.
And imagine the kind of raises you could get from all the tens of billions the city will be forced to dump into infrastructure and security in order to support the two-week ordeal of these useless games.
It's something the mayor might want to consider if he's really serious about that "raise" thing.