With Sixers, corporate welfare leaves home to roost
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
Everyone from the NAACP to Koch Brothers-funded groups agrees: This sucks.
For the 76ers, "Philadelphia freedom" means the freedom of big business to not pay their share of taxes the way regular human beings must.
The NBA team "will cross the river to the Camden waterfront to open a new headquarters and a state-of-the-art, 120,000-square-foot practice center by June 2016, thanks to $82 million in tax credits approved by the New Jersey Economic Development Authority Board," as the Daily News reports. They will still play home games in South Philly.
That taxpayer largesse goes to a basketball team owned by Apollo Global Management co-founder Josh Harris, who, according to Forbes, has a net worth of $2.7 billion. Camden has a median household income of $26,705, with 39 percent of people living under the poverty line.
Camden County NAACP president Kelly Francis asked 76ers CEO Scott O'Neil whether the new complex would offer any entry-level jobs.
"We need a shooting guard," he joked.
The Sixers have accustomed their fans to losses on the court. Now, fans will be losing some of the cash in their pocketbooks as well.
The Nutter administration told the Daily News that they were disappointed in the Sixers departure, saying it could cost the city as much as $2 million in wage taxes. But this is a game that Philadelphia, which doles out lavish tax abatements for new construction, plays all too well. So do most other cities and states. Big business is everywhere the big winner.
Francis pointed out that taxpayer dollars lavished on private development in Camden have never trickled down to working-class residents in the past, as the Inquirer's 2009 series on the state's failed efforts in the city make clear.
Even Americans for Prosperity, the Tea Party outfit funded by the billionaire Libertarian Koch Brothers, joined Francis in criticizing the "corporate-welfare handout:"
"Senator Doherty is right. This amounts to nothing more than a 'free gift' to a politically connected billionaire," said AFP state director Daryn Iwicki, "and it's one we can ill afford given the enormity of the State's fiscal problems."
"How many failures do we have to see? How many times must taxpayers be left on the hook before we realize this kind of corporate welfare just doesn't work?"
