If you read the internet, which clearly you do or how else are you seeing this, you may have noticed that it’s getting harder and harder to actually get any information from news sites these days. Between paywalls, a barrage of ever more intrusive ads, and clickbait editorial stylings (This Famous Celebrity Just Did a Thing You Won’t Believe!), readers are increasingly fighting a losing battle to find out what’s going on in the world, and that’s even before we get into everything increasingly being written by ChatGPT.
Which brings us to yesterday’s headline at Cleveland.com:
Hmm? That’s the argument being made by advocates of a Cleveland Browns stadium subsidy, certainly: This is all “stadium-related” tax money, so it doesn’t matter if the state gives $600 million of it to Browns owner Jimmy Haslam. (Another $600 million would come from the city of Brook Park and Cuyahoga County, and that’s also part of the stadium deal, but apparently it’s considered rude to say so out loud.) Except that the bill would siphon off all taxes — sales, income, anything else not nailed down — from an as-yet-undetermined area surrounding the stadium, so it could affect you even if you’re just going near the games. And since these are taxes that are currently being paid into the state’s general fund on Browns-related sales and income at their existing stadium, instead giving the money to Haslam would be a net loss for anyone who relies on the state of Ohio to fund anything else, like schools or roads or what have you.
So who said that quote, anyway? An economist? A state legislator? A Browns lobbyist? ChatGPT? The Cleveland.com story, which is only two paragraphs long (unless there’s a longer version behind the paywall, but if so most readers will never see it*), doesn’t actually cite the quote at all, forcing interested readers to dig through its Today in Ohio podcast episode, which sports the title “Ohio House budget makes another devastating assault on public schools.” That title only refers to proposed property tax breaks that are threatening to eat into the schools budget, though; what about proposed tax redirection for Haslam?
Scroll past enough Home Depot ads, and you finally get to the Browns section around eight minutes in:
Cleveland Plain Dealer editor Chris Quinn: “The Haslams have put together a financing deal that on the surface looks a lot better for taxpayers than the recent deals for renovations for the Guardians and the Cavaliers….”
Impact editor Leila Atassi: “When you actually dig into the numbers on the Brook Park proposal, it is a lot better than the deals we’ve seen for renovations at Rocket Arena or Progressive Field. Here’s what we’ve found: The Haslams want, of course, the state and Cuyahoga County to each borrow $600 million to help build this new stadium, but the way they plan to pay it back is different: About 85% of the taxes would come directly from people who use the stadium, through things like ticket and parking taxes, or taxes generated by the surrounding development. Only about 15% would fall on the general public, like tourists who stay in hotels or people renting cars. So basically, if you avoid hotels in Cuyahoga County and rental cars, you won’t be paying for this stadium.”
Okay, let’s take a minute and talk about how the system of taxation actually operates. There are two pieces to it: First, the state or another governmental body collects them; then, it spends the proceeds on something. If the tax rate is raised to pay for a project — as was done with cigarette and alcohol taxes for the Guardians — that’s new tax revenue. And if more tax money comes in than would have without the project, those are incremental tax revenues.
Read the podcast quote again, and it increasingly comes off as complete nonsense. The money used would all come from existing taxes, not new ones, so people going to games or renting cars wouldn’t be paying any more than they would be in the absence of a new stadium. The difference is in what would happen to that tax money once it was collected, as it would now be handed over to Haslam instead of being kept to pay for government services. So the only way it wouldn’t cost regular Ohioans anything would be if there was an incremental increase in the amount of taxes collected as a result of the Browns moving a few miles south and any additional development that happened in Brook Park that otherwise would not take place anywhere in Ohio — neither of which are things that the Haslam proposal even pretends to claim it can prove would happen.
But let’s keep listening and see where that quote in the headline comes from:
Quinn: “At heart, they’ve come up with a plan where if you’re not going to the games, it’s largely not going to affect you. And we haven’t been able to say that about any other stadium deal pretty much in the history of Cleveland. And so that’s why it was kind of important to do the story. I don’t think people hate them are going to take the trouble to read it; they’re just going to say, ‘No. No. No.’ But the idea is they’re going to have to play somewhere, and they’ve come up with a deal that, from my standpoint, I don’t have to pay anything. That’s okay with me to not have to pay anything for this.”
Atassi: “That’s true.”
At the risk of being predictable: No. No. No. It’s simply not true that Ohio can take $1.2 billion in tax money and give it to the local billionaire sports owner and it won’t cost Ohioans a dime. But by employing enough doubletalk and hoping that listeners won’t think too hard about how taxes work, it’s possible to pretend that public money isn’t really public money, because someone related to the team touched it once.
I’m the first to acknowledge that modern journalists have a rough time of it, what with a dwindling handful of reporters forced to stay on top of the news while being graded on how many clicks they get. But this is straight-up journalistic malpractice: Two top editors at the city’s most prominent news source misleading listeners about basic economics, without even asking someone who could explain how budgets work.
And what does an actual economist have to say about this?
When compared to other shit sandwiches, this shit sandwich isn't so bad. #journalism www.cleveland.com/news/2025/04…
— J.C. Bradbury (@jcbradbury.bsky.social) 2025-04-14T23:41:57.559Z
Now there’s a headline. Somebody get J.C. a job as impact editor.
*UPDATE: A reader finally sent me a copy of the full paywalled version of the article, which does cite Quinn as the source of the quote, though it doesn’t identify who he is. And it also includes this disclaimer:
Artificial intelligence was used to help generate this story from Today in Ohio, a news podcast discussion by cleveland.com editors. Visitors to cleveland.com have asked for more text stories based on website podcast discussions.
Something tells me that when readers were asking for more “text stories” based on podcasts, they didn’t mean AI hallucinations. Though honestly the AI doesn’t appear to have been hallucinating here any more than the human podcast hosts, so maybe it’s all just part and parcel of the gray goo.