What about the denouncing of the media or overzealous prosecutors who are wasting everyone’s time investigating a trivial issue, creating a distraction from the real problems impacting people’s lives?

Step 5.  Legal action to effect restitution, penalties, or convictions. (Optional)

Bloomberg’s likely truly not directly involved with acquistions of these seats, or most of the details of the financing of the stadium (though I’m sure that he did rubber stamp them, after some advisor with a law background told him yes, everything’s clean).  Seems to me he’s making a real honest attempt to do right by the issue, putting them up for sale and donating the proceeds to community projects in the South Bronx.  Certainly a more conciliatory showing than what’s coming out of Springfield, Ill. these days.

It is criminal, though, that the Yankees got public financing for their new stadium and then dropped half a billion on 3 players.  Someone should have to go to jail.

Weird web, though.  Public pays that money, which finances the stadium, which allows the team to bring in players at higher salaries, generating higher tax revenue for the city and state.  Over the life of the stadium, does the marginal boost that the publically financed venue adds to the payroll (versus what it would be if they didn’t rebuild at all, or financed themselves entirely) pay for itself (or more than pay for itself?) in increased taxes?  Have never thought about it that way, and would be striking if it does.

@Nevin - You can be pretty sure that the tax breaks do not pay for themselves.  As a back-of-the-envelope calculation, say the Yankees never rebuild and stay in the original Yankee Stadium.  Would they be able to afford Messrs. Sabathia, Burnett, and Teixeira?  Maybe not, but they’d certainly be able to afford at least one or two.  That means the marginal impact of the new stadium is the ability to sign one or two of those players.

Ballparks.com says that the Yankees got $220M from NYC in public financing, not including the sweethart tax breaks the team got on the bond deals that constitute their private financing portion.

Let’s say that the new stadium gives them the ability to sign both Sabathia and Teixiera for their $340M of contracts.  That’s about $48M/year for the two of them.  To pay off the $220M of direct public funding, those two players would have to pay $31M/year.  Even if they lived in NYC year-round (and thus paid taxes on 100% of that income), they would have to be paying 64% of their salary in taxes.  No one comes close to paying that much in income tax, not federally and definitely not to New York State.  (The top federal tax rate in the U.S. was 35% in 2007.  The top tax rate in New York is 7.7%.)

Even if you said that the new stadium allowed the Yankees to sign all three players, they’d still have to pay 50% of their salaries in income tax.

Or looked at another way, the extra $64M/year that the Yankees are spending on these three would take 44 years to pay off the $220M of public financing.

Considering that the players probably reside in some other state like Florida (and therefore only pay New York taxes on the days they “work” in the Bronx), they actually only pay New York State income tax on about 42% of their salary.  That means it would take 106 years of paying 7.7% income tax to pay off the $220M of public financing.

For comparison, had the city instead invested that $220M in something that returned a modest 3% per year, they would have $5 billion after 106 years.

Step 2a: Claim that the transaction is so complicated that the uneducated masses can’t possibly understand it -

“It’s nothing wrong. It’s just another part of a very complex deal.” - Bloomberg, Newsday 9/17/08

Bloomberg won’t take the fall for this, his lackey Pinsky will. He’s the Mayor’s attack dog on this issue and has made most of the outrageous statements regarding the cost/benefit analysis:  “I’d like to think that Assembly Member Brodsky is simply misinformed, but after all of the public hearings, questions and analysis, it is becoming increasingly difficult to explain his blatant and fundamental errors and omissions.”