Thank you Chad! I too am growing weary of the hay-seed mentality screeching the bogus argument against spending money “for the Kings”.

To address just that one point:

1) An arena, especially as part of a mixed development including: retail, office, transportation and residential is a public utility no different than are roads, fire and police protection, public transportation, sidewalks and parks. All of which are just the beginning of the list of proper expenditures of taxpayer’s hard-earned money.

2) An arena is NOT “for the Kings”. The Kings and the Monarchs combined account for only around 100 dates out of the 300 or more events which would book into a proper venue. The Kings are only the anchor tenant for the entertainment mall that is an arena which brought 2,000,000 bodies through the turnstile last year....despite the fact that it is an ill-placed, substandard dump. Figure a conservative C-Note per body and do the rest of the math yourself.

The argument that tax money should not be spent on a private enterprise is specious in that all of the tax expenditures which I listed above are exactly that!

• Roads are built specifically to facilitate private enterprise in the form of: giving General Motors (for only one example) a place where people may use GM products, and to make possible the distribution of goods and services from private enterprise to private individuals. This is not to even begin to mention the costs associated, such as: patrols, plowing (where it snows) and the various environmental and social costs arising from those roads (for air travelers; make note that you would be grounded if not for taxpayer funded Air Traffic Control, publicly funded-airports and military money that keeps Boeing afloat - for starters). This is why GM & Firestone combined forces in the early days of the last century to buy up and dismatle public transportation systems nation-wide and lobby for tax-funded road and highway improvements and expansions! Entire industries (and tens of millions of jobs, including yours - and their hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes) that we take for granted today would not exist today if they hadn't.

• Police and fire are designed to provide protection to private business and residential property

• Public transportation provides a means of mobility to private individuals, who have already paid taxes to finance roads for GM but choose not to purchase a product from GM

• Sidewalks are a convenience to shield private pedestrians from the consequences of co-existing on the roads built for private enterprise

• Parks are built for private individual’s recreation


You get the idea. All of the tax-funded things that I mentioned, which we all agree are perfectly appropriate tax expenditures are designed almost exclusively for the benefit of private enterprise or private individuals. None of the above is designed to make a direct profit, but rather to contribute to the overall prosperity of any given geographic region and population. If an arena is not a proper expenditure – as part of a planned mix of development – then why should GM and the other vehicle manufacturers not be forced to pay to build and maintain the street upon which you live, or the individual user not pay a fee to cover the full costs of those roads? The answer is simple. Either cars and trucks would not exist, or you'd pay more for a Yugo than what you paid for your house..... which you could not afford either because you would have to bear all of the costs involved in maintaining and protecting it that are now taken care of by the rest of us. But that point is moot, because you would likely not have a job to pay for your home, Yugo, food, education for your kids or anything else. Do you feel up to sod-busting and wringing the necks of chickens to survive?

As for the “for the Kings” idiocy… Yea, let’s have a big barn for tractor pulls and Disney on Ice paid for by… oh, wait. Yea. Let the arena be a privately funded, for-profit institution and see how many Gun & Doll shows it takes to make it work. Even the most wooden-headed moron knows that a shopping mall will not succeed without at least one major anchor. Unfortunately, the so-called leadership here is not up to the level of wooden-headed morons.


Listen to KFBK weeknights from 7-10 PM for details on how you may join in me banging pots and pans for immigration reform in the very belly of the beast, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. this April 23-28!

Mark Williams
Weeknights 7 - 10 PM
News/Talk 1530 KFBK AM