I’d encourage everyone that makes public policy around here to read and carefully consider the following:
Experts will calculate impact of Peter Anderson festival ~ Mary Perez
Normally this is the kind of story a hometown newspaper usually butchers but Perez does a good job here. This I’d predict sight unseen because the laws of economics are no different on the Mississippi Coast from the rest of the country. The Peter Anderson Festival is a bad deal for the local taxpayers and despite the so called experts weighing in attempting to prettify the socialization of losses on the backs of the taxpayers to pecuniary benefit of another party:
“We know for every dollar we spend on advertising, a tourist comes in and spends $13,” said Richard Chenoweth, a commissioner with the CVB in Jackson County.
“This is one of the premier festivals — it gets all the awards,” he said. “But the actual impact, I don’t think anyone knows.”
Renee Areng, CVB director, said, “We’ll have a better idea of the impact after this year.”
Actually Perez’s article gives everyone a very good idea of the impact of the Festival. I do not know that I buy Chenoweth’s $1 for $13 spending assertion but for the sake of argument let’s run with those numbers to get the implied cost benefit of spending a tax dollar on tourism advertising which is $13 * 7% =.91 or 91 cents in sales tax. Forget the 2011 study that calculated an economic impact of $23 million dollars for the Festival because it is likely not worth the paper it is written on but more on that in a bit. What do actual sales tax numbers say? Continue reading “Economics 101: Of course there will be an economic benefit to some if the costs are socialized”