The lead GOP pitcher for sports pork is President George W. Bush, who launched a federally sponsored initiative last week to revitalize baseball. He will host kiddie T-ball games on the White House lawn and recruit Cabinet officials to help promote the sport. Plus, he promised to throw out the first pitch at the Milwaukee Brewers' new ballpark.

Many of Bush's supporters will argue that there's no harm in embracing athletic nostalgia and patriotic symbolism. But there's nothing romantic about raiding the public purse, which is what modern baseball increasingly is all about. The president's latest crusade is a foul play that undermines the credibility of serious fiscal conservatism.

Take Miller Park, the $400 million stadium in Milwaukee. The Brewers paid for less than one-fourth of the cost of stadium construction, and much of that came from subsidized government loans. Taxpayers voted overwhelmingly against public funding for the Brewers' new home. But they were forced to pick up the rest of the tab through a sales tax hike, totaling $300 million, imposed upon them in 1995 by the state legislature.

Prominent Republican officials from New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani to Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum to Massachusetts Gov. Paul Celluci to Florida Gov. Jeb Bush have joined tax-happy Democrats in drumming up public money to pay for new sports stadiums at nosebleed prices. Economist Raymond J. Keating, of the Washington, D.C.-based Small Business Survival Committee, estimates the total costs of building big league ballparks at $11.5 billion, with taxpayers picking up about 81 percent of the tab, or $9.3 billion.

It wasn't always this way. Keating writes: Ballparks were once privately financed. Like other businesses, team owners bought the land and erected their own facilities. Before 1953, only one Major League Baseball club played in a government-funded stadium, and 75 percent of funding for ballparks came from private sources. Since then, only one big league ballpark has been built without taxpayer money, while 19 baseball stadiums were 100 percent taxpayer-funded. Given current efforts, Keating predicts, another $5 billion to $6 billion could be spent in the next few years on big league ballparks, with taxpayers easily on the hook for at least $3.5 billion to $4 billion.

It is bad enough that Bush will lend his implicit endorsement to such baseball tax thievery by agreeing to go to Miller Park. What's worse is the continued political dissonance Bush creates every time he speaks of letting Americans keep more of their own money and sending tax dollars back to the people so government can't spend it.

As managing partner of the Texas Rangers, Bush championed a sales tax increase and loan package worth $135 million for the construction of a new baseball stadium. Defenders of the deal -- which also gave a quasi-governmental sports authority the power to condemn private land for the new ballpark, shops and a hotel -- note that local residents approved the tax hike. But support came only after the Rangers threw a tantrum and threatened to leave. Moreover, Bush essentially bribed minorities into voting for the tax increase by campaigning personally at black churches and promising to reward them with racial set-aside construction contracts.

Yuck. With Republicans cheerleading for these crummy corporate welfare payoffs, who needs big-spending Democrats?

Copyright Creators Syndicate Inc.

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