The National Football League season will open tonight in New Jersey’s Metlife stadium, the only NFL stadium that was built without some sort of public support. All of the other NFL venues either received direct subsidies for their construction or benefit from other publicly funded improvements.

And NFL franchises are certainly not the only ones benefiting from taxpayer largesse. According to an analysis by Bloomberg News, taxpayers have spent $4 billion on subsidies for sports structures since 1986 via tax exemptions that come along with the bonds used to finance stadium or arena construction:

Tax exemptions on interest paid by muni bonds that were issued for sports structures cost the U.S. Treasury $146 million a year, based on data compiled by Bloomberg on 2,700 securities. Over the life of the $17 billion of exempt debt issued to build stadiums since 1986, the last of which matures in 2047, taxpayer subsidies to bondholders will total $4 billion, the data show.

Those estimates are based on what the Treasury could have collected on interest from the same amount of taxable bonds sold at the same time to investors in the 25 percent income-tax bracket, the rate many government agencies assume. In fact, more than half the owners of tax-exempt bonds pay top rates of at least 30 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office. So they save even more on their income taxes, a system that U.S. lawmakers of both parties and President Barack Obama have described as inefficient and unfair.

These bonds raise money to pay for construction and improvements, enabling wealthy franchise owners to avoid paying for their own stadiums or fancy new upgrades. Individuals who invest in the bonds then receive tax exemptions, lowering government revenue; so the subsidy for stadium construction “comes out of the pockets of every American taxpayer.” Using bonds to finance stadium construction is nothing more than a transfer of taxpayer money to wealthy franchise owners whose teams can be worth billions of dollars.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the public money thrown at sports franchises. For instance, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones pays no property taxes on Cowboys Stadium, saving his franchise $17 million per year.

Franchises often use the threat of moving to a new city to extort more expensive facilities and ever bigger heaps of tax exemptions from fans and politicians loathe to see the local team disappear. But states and cities should really question whether new stadiums for already wealthy individuals are the best way to spend often scarce taxpayer dollars.

Our guest bloggers are Julia Gordon, Director of Housing Finance and Policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, and John Griffith, a policy analyst at CAPAF.

After months of avoiding the issue on the campaign trail, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney last night finally released an overview of his housing plan.

But instead of listing the specific ways a Romney White House would support a housing recovery — the early stages of which already appears to be underway — roughly half of the 700-word “plan” is dedicated to attacking President Obama’s record. Where Romney does mention policy, he’s characteristically light on details and heavy on platitudes. The Romney plan has four components:

• Responsibly sell the 200,000 vacant foreclosed homes owned by the government;

• Facilitate foreclosure alternatives for those who cannot afford to pay their mortgage;

• Replace complex rules with smart regulation to hold banks accountable, restore a functioning marketplace and restart lending to creditworthy borrowers;

• Protect taxpayers from additional risk in the future by reforming Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac”

If none of these ideas sound new, it’s because they aren’t. Let’s take each in turn.

First, foreclosed homes. The Obama administration this year worked with Fannie Mae and its federal regulator to conduct an unprecedented bulk sale of government-owned homes. The sale, which was extremely successful in attracting private capital, is now moving thousands of homes off the government books to be converted to rentals. Romney offers no ways to improve or expand this initiative.

Second, foreclosure prevention. The Obama administration’s Making Home Affordable program has helped millions of families avoid foreclosure by refinancing to today’s historically low rates, modifying their loan, or negotiating a short sale or deed-in-lieu-of-foreclosure; it has established an industry standard for mitigating losses and keeping families in their homes. Meanwhile, Romney has yet to offer any specific alternatives for families facing foreclosure, other than letting the foreclosure process “run its course and hit the bottom.” (Imagine if Obama’s jobs plan was “facilitate alternatives to unemployment for those who cannot find a job.”)

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