This might do the trick. When Norm boasts in the glory of corporate welfare that he helped provide the Minnesota Wild. A company that continually tries to have get out of their end of the contract by requesting their loans be forgiven while simultaneously asking for public money to build a practice facility for the team:
Call him on it:
Then watch St Paul’s former mayor call me a grinch for opposing corporate welfare for the NHL:
Perhaps pointing out that Norm Coleman used the public’s money to subsidize his private entertainment went too far?
Apparently it was for @normcoleman because that’s when he blocked me.
I imagine that politicians like Norm Coleman would prefer that taxpayers forgot about the corporate welfare they gave away. Yes, we have the Wild. We’re paying for them every day. Even when they don’t make the playoffs. Even when they’re on strike. Even when there’s a lockout.
Money that taxpayers continue to pay to subsidize a private business that competes for entertainment dollars against other locally owned businesses that don’t receive hundreds of millions of dollars in public subsidies. If Norm Coleman had walked down Payne Ave as mayor and asked people what the city could do to make their lives better, subsidizing the NHL probably wouldn’t have been at the top of the list. Different priorities.
Perhaps Coleman wouldn’t be taking credit on Twitter on a Saturday night in 2013 for having made the streets safer or schools better on the East Side of St Paul in the year 2000, but that’s the kind of good government stuff we need more of from our politicians.
Maybe it makes me a fun-hater to think that NHL fans are perfectly capable of using their own money to pay for their own entertainment rather than rely upon corporate welfare with the help of Norm Coleman? The only thing better than paying full price to watch Derek Boogaard contract CTE is to pay a taxpayer subsidized price to watch Derek Boogaard contract CTE, eh?
We need a word for this. Whorebanned? Integrity certified? Or maybe it’s just enough to know that you buy your own clothes instead of shopping on Nasser Khazeminy’s dime.
I think that Norm Coleman is from the school of thought that stadiums DO help cities. He likely believes that professional sports teams can help the local economy, help the local people by giving them something to root for and help attract more taxpaying citizens to live in the city. These assumptions, of course, have been proven wrong time and time again.
@Mark, it would be nice if Norm has applied the same private financing principles to the NHL as he applied to his wardrobe.
@Nathaniel, people see the people at the events and see something positive, but have a harder time imagining that the money spent there would have been spent elsewhere if not for favoritism of a single business over every other business that competes for entertainment dollars.
Norm Coleman doesn’t like hard questions.
During his Senate campaign Norm Coleman routinely banned media (such as The UpTake) from his press conferences because he apparently didn’t like the questions we asked.