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By Robert N. Jenkins Time to reach into the roll-aboard to clear out the stuff that always gets trapped in those elasticized pockets. . . . Why, here's a rant, right up front. What's that, John? It's raining? Gaggles of lobbyists have been trying to convince legislators to pass - or defeat - a county-option tax that would raise about $400-million to build a stadium for the Florida Marlins in Dade County. Despite the rhetoric on each side, there are no victims here, only multimillionaires hoping to get even richer. Briefly, a rich man named John Henry bought the woeful Marlins from an even richer man, Wayne Huizenga, who claimed he lost tens of millions with the team before and after stocking it with overpaid players who won him a World Series. Huizenga sold the team last year to Henry, who apparently reads neither the attendance figures at the bottom of the major-league box scores nor the weather report. I must have a new stadium, Henry declared this year, one with a retractable roof, so that when rain threatens - as it does every summer day in Florida - my fans will still come to the park. By the way, Henry added, I don't want to pay for the stadium for my team: Let's have someone else pay. Not Floridians, of course; let's stick it to travelers barely passing through our state. Let's make cruise-ship passengers buy me a stadium! How could you?! agonized the wealthy-enough-to-buy-Huizenga cruise moguls. You'll chase away our passengers. Friends, that's not going to happen, even if the Legislature does pass the tax-option bill, even if Gov. Jeb Bush decides not to veto it and even if Miami-Dade voters then approve it. The reason: The $4-a-day tax per passenger is not going to dissuade anyone from taking a cruise. Typically, the best fare you can get for the popular Caribbean three- and four-night sailings averages $75 to $90 a day. If you were going to pay $360 for one of these four-day trips, would you refuse to go because it suddenly cost $376? More important to this discussion, why should anybody but the owner have to pay for a new playground for his team? Surely the taxpayers of Hillsborough and Tampa, Pinellas and St. Petersburg, can empathize. Similar taxes have been levied on travelers in many states, including Florida; the most
common are levies on car rentals and hotel beds. You ought to resent these pass-it-on
taxes. As for John Henry and the cruise-line owners, fie on all of them. |
