A few months ago, when Seahawks owner Ken Behring tried to move his NFL team to Southern California, the morning host of local sports-talk radio KJR recorded an opinion piece played throughout the day that savaged not only Behring but everyone in his income bracket. ("The rich are not like you and me...they can write their own laws...") As a blatant comment on the class war that passes for public policy these days, it was far gutsier than anything that, say, NPR would dare air--and it came from the sports chuckleheads that intellectual progressive types love to sneer at. It was a welcome and useful reminder--not heard, of course, by anyone not listening to KJR at the time--that what radicals sometimes think to be daring observations are just plain common sense to an awful lot of folks.

So what happened? Now a new, even richer, owner is on the horizon, and those same fans want to bail out billionaire Paul Allen by having the public build him a new stadium. ("Yes, but he's our billionaire...") Yet another sad testimony to short memories.

But wait! In an effort to shore up his underfunded campaign for governor (due to end today), Democrat Jay Inslee, an otherwise undistinguished Clintonoid, has taken on the football stadium issue and hit a nerve. Inslee asked a perfectly reasonable (and therefore rarely asked) question: why should the public finance a $300 million private playpen when its schools and roads are falling apart from lack of money? In doing so, he found an issue on which both of his leading Democratic rivals were very, very vulnerable.

King County exec Gary Locke, one opponent, was particularly conspicuous last fall in his advocacy of a new baseball stadium--and, when voters rejected it in November, promptly found another way to ram ahead with it at taxpayer expense. And Seattle Mayor Norm Rice has based his whole career on his love of high-visibility megaprojects that only benefit a few wealthy friends (aka "donors"). In addition to backing the baseball park last fall and the Commons twice, Rice's years as mayor have seen two overpriced transit packages, fancy urban village redevelopment schemes, a big new jail and several other new public buildings in the works. Rice also gutted low income housing (and help for the homeless) while giving massive subsidies to attract new high-profile downtown eyesores like Nordstroms, Niketown, and the whole wretched Sixth Avenue corridor. Of course, Seattle's nine cookie-cutter City Council members, proud liberals each, were essentially on board for all this, too.

The only problem with Inslee's question--why the public should be subsidizing wealthy businesses--is that it applies to just about everything local government does. Generally the mantra is that these policies "provide jobs." The stadium question is particularly ludicrous on this score; one of the alleged benefits of the baseball stadium, when it was proposed last year, was that it would provide 1,800 new jobs! Accepting at face value that low wage, temporary service jobs are desirable and that 1,800 jobs would be created, for the price tag of the stadium it came out to about $110,000 of public money spent per job. It would literally create more jobs, and a helluva lot more excitement, to pick 1,800 names out of a phone book and give each of them $110,000.

A football facility, used ten times a year so a lot of corporate execs could watch from their suites while millionaires on the field beat the crap out of each other, makes even less sense. But for any corporate giveaway of this sort, whether for Paul Allen, Boeing or Nordstroms, the point is that tax dollars are being transferred to the rich, who can then, if they want to, create some jobs of their choosing at some point in the future. Maybe. Or, maybe they'll take the money for themselves. Or use it to buy out local competitors and eliminate jobs. Or build a new factory in Mexico. Good deal, huh?

Let's nip this football stadium stuff in the bud (before these idiots even start to think about their more-asinine-yet Olympic bid plans). And, perhaps, use the issue as a way to highlight all the tax breaks, zoning variances and selective legal enforcements used less visibly by local governments to further enrich the wealthy every day.