Wednesday, September 22, 2004

Mas Propoganda

We continue to receive "mailers" about every other day. A new crop is from the Vote Yes! A Win for Arlington Committee, which seems to be a sister group of Touchdown Arlington but sends out only one page mailers such as this one

Over the weekend we received two other mailers (I forgot to bring them to school with me, but will try to scan them on Thursday), one saying a vote for the stadium is a vote for the children of Arlington. Why? Because the Cowboys will give $500,000 per year to local youth sports programs for the next thirty years. The donations are not indexed to inflation, so assuming 3% inflation the $500,000 contribution in 2034 will be worth about $205,000.

My take: In general, I am very wary of anyone who pulls out the "do it for the children" excuse. The stadium will not do much for my daughter, however investing in the school system, reducing crime, and other things that can be more convincingly argued to be public goods, will help my daughter. Doing it for the children is a red flag and those who invoke the excuse generally do so out of intellectual laziness or outright deception.