Weekly Writers Round-Up: Football Stadium Subsidies, Fixing Foreign Policy, and the Google Antitrust Lawsuit

Each week, we’ll be featuring opinion pieces from the alumni and current participants of AFF’s Writing Fellows Program. A few highlights from the past week are below. Do you dream of having bylines like these? Learn more about how the Writing Fellows Program can help boost your writing career!

Welcome Back Football, But Leave Subsidies on the Bench by Skip Estes (Spring 2019) in Townhall
It’s official: football Sundays are back. Last month the Las Vegas Raiders officially unveiled their new, state-of-the-art home at Allegiant Stadium. With a sleek, black 275-foot videoboard that looks like it belongs in the Death Star and a real grass field grown atop a track that allows it to be rolled outside for sun exposure, the facility cost $1.9 billion — a pretty penny. Yet, the Raiders organization is not breaking a sweat over the astronomical cost of their new stadium. Why? Perhaps $750 million in taxpayer dollars has something to do with it.

Prior to 2017, Las Vegas, “The Entertainment Capital of the World,” surprisingly lacked a single high-revenue professional sports team. During his tenure as Clark County commissioner, now-Governor Steve Sisolak made bringing professional sports into Las Vegas a goal of his administration. To that end, Clark County issued $750 million in municipal revenue bonds to secure the Oakland Raiders’ relocation to Las Vegas, becoming Nevada’s first NFL team. All the Raiders had to do was purchase a stadium construction site and pony up their share of the estimated construction costs. Altogether, this deal allowed the Raiders to pay only 61% of the total bill on the most expensive stadium ever built for a team…

U.S. Foreign Policy: Keep the Main Thing the Main Thing by Gil Barndollar (Summer 2018) in RealClearDefense
Regardless of whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden wins in November, the next president will confront both a divided America and a world in its usual disarray. Among the many foreign policy challenges facing the new administration, three are critical: China, Russia, and America’s own broken diplomatic instrument…

Beware of politicizing antitrust lawsuits by Eric Peterson (Fall 2014) in The Center Square
This week, Attorney General Bill Barr joined attorneys general from 11 other states, including Louisiana, in releasing their much-anticipated antitrust lawsuit against Google.

The 64-page lawsuit lays out a series of claims against Google for its alleged violation of American antitrust laws. The central claim asserts that Google has a monopoly on general internet searches, resulting in higher ad prices and a worse consumer experience. This complaint and others in the lawsuit require some skepticism…