Major-league baseball agreed to let the Expos move to Washington, D.C., on the premise that the city’s taxpayers would cough up a bunch of dough to build a new ballpark at no cost to the team’s yet-to-be-named owners. Since moving to the nation’s capital, the team’s looked for a new name but more importantly for a handout.

Economics professor Dennis Coates explains why this is a terrible idea that won’t benefit anyone but those very owners. Funding sports stadia with taxpayer dollars is one of the most egregious forms of corporate welfare. Why, I even wrote a paper on the topic.

UPDATE: A good blog I recently discovered that exclusively deals with the topic of taxpayer-funded stadia is Field of Schemes. It’s the offshoot of a book by that title, which I have not read, but the blog is a good read in and of itself.