Pull the Plug on the new Downtown Arena

$665 million – the latest revised cost of the Downtown Arena. We’re getting close to $1,000 for every man, woman, and child in Louisville Metro. Waiting to see if interest rates will go down is Russian roulette. I’d venture a guess with a War in Iraq costing $300 million per day (hmm, call this off for a couple of days and we could have a new Arena), expansion of Medicare with free prescription medicine (unfunded, with a projected cost of $1.2 trillion between now and 2015), and a diving US dollar, odds are pretty good interest rates are going up. Way up.

Remember 1965? LBJ launched The Great Society, which brought us both Medicare and The War on Poverty. Coupled with Vietnam (one war is never enough for some Presidents), interest rates soared into double digits. Interestingly, the removal of silver from our coinage in 1965 foretold of the coming inflation. I’d say we’re pretty much on course for an instant replay given that pennies now cost more to produce than they are worth. (Since the government had to take most of the copper out of a penny in 1982 to prevent citizens from melting them, the next step is elimination of the penny altogether. Watch for it.) I find eerily coincidental a same day report about a man in Zimbabwe threatened with jail for using the 10-cent paper note as a business card with inflation there running at 100,000%.

In college economics, I was introduced to the dangers of government policy which promised both guns and butter. With the national debt over $9 trillion and climbing, every child born in the US enters this world over $30,000 in debt. While there’s little Louisvillians can do to change national policy, we were wise enough to vote down new libraries, as well as the new library tax. It’s time to summon the same courage, cancel plans for the new arena, and continue enjoying the Cards in Freedom Hall.

George Dick
Vice-Chairman
Libertarian Party of Kentucky