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Super Bowl 52, or rather, Super Bowl LII, to follow the numbering convention that the National Football League has chosen to distinguish all of its championship games but the 50th one from each other, featured the Philadelphia Eagles defeating the New England Patriots at the U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Now that it’s all over, we can confirm that the biggest loser at the big game wasn’t the New England Patriots, but rather, the residents of both the state of Minnesota and the city of Minneapolis. And it’s not just because their home town team didn’t win enough games to make it to the Super Bowl this year.

Instead, it is because Minnesotans got taken to the cleaners by a billionaire team owner who wanted a stadium that would be Super Bowl-worthy, regardless of whether or not the Minnesota Vikings ever played in the championship game. City Journal‘s Steven Malanga describes how the taxpayers of Minnesota and Minneapolis got played:

Vikings owner Zygi Wilf, a New Jersey real estate developer, began pushing for a new stadium soon after purchasing the team in 2005. His supplications became more earnest after the roof of the Vikings’ old home, the Metrodome, collapsed in December 2010. Wilf originally proposed contributing just one quarter of the new stadium’s $1 billion cost, a spectacularly low-ball offer in an era when backlash against stadium subsidies for professional teams increasingly force owners to pony up a bigger share of construction costs. Wilf claimed that he couldn’t afford more, but he wouldn’t release the financial details of his real estate empire. A Minnesota state investigation, undertaken after a New Jersey judge ruled that the Wilf family had defrauded real estate partners in a local project and had to pay them $84.5 million, determined that the family could afford to pay up to $500 million for the stadium.

Even after Wilf upped his offer, the road to the stadium deal was paved with controversy. Minnesota financed a portion of its share of the costs by introducing a state-licensed electronic-gambling game to generate construction revenues, but the game proved a clunker with local residents; to fill the financing hole, Minnesota drew on revenues from its tobacco tax and increased corporate taxes. Then Wilf announced that he’d help finance his part of the deal by charging season ticketholders a seat license fee—prompting a threat from Minnesota governor Mark Dayton to pull government financing. Dayton soon changed his tune, explaining that sports financing has its own ineffable logic. “I’m not one to defend the economics of professional sports,” he said. “Any deal you make in that world doesn’t make sense from the way the rest of us look at it.”

To translate that last statement, Minnesota’s governor most certainly knew that it was a very bad deal for the state’s taxpayers, one where the state would become a de facto business partner of a billionaire NFL team owner who had been found in court to have defrauded his previous business partners, who would most certainly be the biggest beneficiary of the deal, and chose to do it anyway.

But Governor Mark Dayton wasn’t the only politician to spend their way into the Hall of Shame for stupid stadium deals using their community’s tax dollars. Malanga continues with the story of how more local politicians got in on the deal at considerable cost to their community:

Though it lent its balance sheet to the deal, the city of Minneapolis, according to critics—including one former city councilman—has been “hosed” by the Vikings. The city officially contributed $150 million to stadium construction, but these observers contend that that figure doesn’t include expensive infrastructure improvements that Minneapolis was forced to make. As part of the stadium package, Minneapolis also agreed to send $7.5 million a year in operating subsidies to the authority running the facility, which amounts to $225 million over the course of the deal. City taxpayers also apparently remain on the hook for any shortfalls in the revenues that back the bonds used to build the surrounding infrastructure. Residents understand little of this financing because, as the Minneapolis Star Tribune noted, the stadium deal “was as transparent as the Berlin wall.”

Clearly, it wasn’t such a good deal for either Minnesota’s or Minneapolis’ tax-paying residents. But the story is different for a billionaire team owner that the politicians were desperate to please, who was the one and only clear winner in the taxpayer-financed stadium shenanigans.

Of course, the stadium has been a boon for the Vikings ownership. The Vikings are worth an estimated $2.4 billion, and the new stadium has increased the net worth of Wilf’s business empire by $200 million, according to estimates.

And now, Minneapolis and Minnesota have hosted their one and only Super Bowl, where the NFL is scrapping the bidding process that would make it possible for the city to ever host another. But they’ll always have memories of Super Bowl LII. And the bills for the stadium that it was played in.

As we noted, EPA “policy advisor” John Beale told his bosses he really worked for the CIA and shirked his duties for a decade. During this time, EPA bosses never fired Mr. Beale but they did pay him generous retention bonuses. EPA boss Gina McCarthy presided over the massive toxic spill on Colorado’s Animas River but safely retained her job. Lois Lerner deployed the IRS to target advocates of lower taxes and accountable government but she was not fired. IRS boss John Koskinen covered up the scandal, but he wasn’t fired either. The firing of lower-level government workers is likewise rare, but one exception recently came to light.

On January 13, a Hawaii Emergency Management Agency employee triggered a false alert for an incoming nuclear missile. For the best description of how this happened, see Anthony Pignataro in Mauitime, wondering if Hawaii would survive the “Age of Stupid.” The false alert was a government snafu on a massive scale. Likewise, Pignataro’s report several hours after the false alert confirms that “huge numbers of people–residents and tourists–were terrified.” They didn’t know what was happening or who might be responsible.

As CNN reports, the government employee who triggered the alert “had a history of confusing drill and real-world events.” That serious disconnect led nobody to judge this person unsuitable for the job. After triggering the alert, the employee “seemed confused, he froze and another employee had to take over his responsibilities.” This employee refused to speak with FCC investigators and instead submitted a written account. By the end of January, the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency had fired this employee but did not reveal his identity or what kind of benefits he may have retained. The no-fire zone had been violated but the government employee still enjoyed special protection. When it comes to protecting the public, on the other hand, Hawaiians know their government can be real stupid.

The ongoing saga of cost overruns, waste and bureaucratic mismanagement related to the building of California’s bullet train project/boondoggle has provided a continuous stream of source material for us here at MyGovCost for many years.

But in terms of describing the likely legacy of California’s high speed rail, both Lloyd Billingsley and I would have a tough time topping Victor Davis Hanson’s recent description of the project as “California’s Stonehenge.”

Nobody quite knows who built Stonehenge some 5,000 years ago in southern England. The mysterious ring of huge stone monoliths stands mute.

Californians may leave behind similarly enigmatic monuments for puzzled future generations. Along a 119-mile pathway in central California from Bakersfield to Madera, there are now huge, quarter-finished cement overpasses. These are the totems of the initial segment of a planned high-speed-rail corridor.

Californians thought high-speed rail was a great idea when they voted for it in 2008. The state is overwhelmingly progressive. Silicon Valley reflects California’s confidence in new-age technology. Californians are among the highest-taxed citizens in the nation. They apparently are not opposed to borrowing and spending for ambitious government projects — especially to alleviate crowded freeways.

Planners assured voters that the cost for the first 520 miles was going to be an “affordable” $33 billion. The rail line seemed a good way to connect the state’s economically depressed interior with the affluent coastal corridor.

The segment from Madera to Bakersfield was thought to be the easiest to build. Rural land was cheaper to acquire in the interior of California. The route was flat, without the need to bore tunnels. The valley is considered seismically stable. Economically depressed counties welcomed the state and federal investment dollars.

But projected costs have soared even before one foot of track has been laid. The entire project’s estimated costs, according to various projections, may have nearly doubled. The current cost for the easiest first segment alone has spiraled from a promised $7.8 billion in 2016 to an estimated $10.6. There is no assurance that enough Central Valley riders will wish to use the line.

The fiscal viability of California’s high speed rail project really goes downhill from there, because it has to compete with other goals of the state’s politicians, such as paying pensions to state government employees, implementing a single-payer health care system for state residents, and repairing deteriorating highways and schools, to name just a few, all of which require massive sums of money that the state doesn’t have and is unlikely to ever obtain.

At some point, Californians will demand that the boondoggle that is the California bullet train come to an end. When it does, Hansen anticipates that all the state will have to show for its billions of dollars spent for high speed trains that will never arrive at their destination will be the concrete monoliths it is building today.

Hopefully, the ancient builders of Britain’s Stonehenge got a better return on their investment. And also more use out of it.

Last February 7 during heavy rains, the Oroville Dam’s concrete spillway failed, launching fears of a complete dam failure, and forcing the evacuation of 188,000 people downstream from the structure. As the anniversary approaches, the total costs of the spillway reconstruction, including emergency response, have risen to $870 million according to the state Department of Water Resources. This government agency has no trouble charting costs but other issues remain on the murky side.

The massive January 5 Independent Forensic Team Report: Oroville Dam Spillway Incident, blames the failure on “a complex interaction of relatively common physical, human, organizational, and industry factors, starting with the design of the project and continuing until the incident.” The principal designer for the Oroville spillways was a post-grad student with “no prior professional experience designing spillways.” The forensic team did not name the unqualified designer, and former DWR engineer Don Colson, who worked on the dam, claims “there was no such” person and anybody who says there is “must be suffering from an advanced case of mental illness.” Both sides can’t be right, but DWR bosses and legislators are failing to resolve the mystery, hardly an academic matter.

A new concrete spillway is showing cracks that could lead to safety issues. The city of Oroville has filed a lawsuit against the DWR for mismanagement of the dam. Taxpayers statewide should not be surprised if the total costs wind up well north of $1 billion. And whoever the original spillway designer was, residents in Oroville and points south would have to be crazy to think the 1968 structure is safe.

According to an NBC report by Jaxon Van Derbeken, “Caltrans is investigating whether microscopic organisms are attacking critical welds on the submerged foundation of the new Bay Bridge tower, potentially endangering the projected 150-year lifespan of the troubled $6.4 billion structure.” Brian Maroney, Caltrans’ chief engineer on the project, told NBC that experts report “very small microorganisms that are feeding on iron.” For Caltrans “that’s really something new, and when it’s something new to us, we want to make sure we get on top of it as fast as we can.” Of course, the prospect of microbes chowing down on welds is not the only issue. As the NBC report notes, “this revelation is just the latest in a string of problems that have dogged the project, including cost overruns, flawed welds, broken bolts and pitted cables.”

As we noted, these problems were the subject of hearings in Sacramento in January, 2014. Witnesses testified that Caltrans bosses compromised public safety by ignoring problems with welds, bolts and rods. Caltrans also outsourced work to China, where workers produced cracked welds. Caltrans bridge engineer Douglas Coe testified that every one of the 750 panels had to be repaired. Caltrans geologist Michael Moore testified that safety problems were kept secret, ignored and covered up. Rep. Mark DeSaulnier, then a state senator overseeing the hearings, charged “a deliberate and willful attempt to obfuscate what is happening to the public” but failed to follow up on whistleblower’s call for a criminal investigation. “It’s frustrating that there’s never been anyone in the management of the bridge who has been held accountable.” DeSaulnier later lamented. And when apprised of the safety issues, governor Jerry Brown replied, “I mean, look, shit happens.”

In the 2014 hearing, nobody warned about the predatory microbes that Caltrans claims are now on the prowl. As they ponder the long-term risk, taxpayers and motorists might also recall that the bridge came in 10 years late and $5 billion over budget.

As we noted last month, sexual abuse has been thriving in Hollywood, Congress, the media, and in the California legislature. Senate boss Kevin de Leon sought to hire an independent legal firm to investigate but the latest revelations come from a different source. According to an investigation by the Sacramento Bee, “the state paid more than $25 million in the last three fiscal years to settle sexual harassment claims against state agencies and public universities. Sexual harassment settlements cost California taxpayers about $21.3 million of that amount, while the two university systems say insurance plans covered their payouts of nearly $3.9 million during the same three-year period.”

According to the investigation, California is outpacing New York and Florida in the volume of sexual harassment claims and settlement costs. Those involve 24 California state agencies and 10 campuses in both university systems. The payouts ranged from a relatively meager $500 to a prison inmate to the $10 million the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation paid in 2016 to wards claiming abuse by a staff counselor. The highest single settlement was a cool $1.7 million to Tyann Sorrell of UC Berkeley School of Law for sexual harassment at the hands of former dean Sujit Choudhry. The state did not volunteer any of this information nor make it easy for anyone to find.

The Bee investigators had to piece together more than 40 California Public Records Act requests and copies of settlement agreements from the 38 state entities with 900 or more employees, excluding the judicial branch. The $25 million in payouts over the past three years, “almost certainly under-estimates the scope of California’s settlement costs.” The figure that California taxpayers should have paid out is zero. Dean Choudhry and his fellow abusers should have paid the settlements out of their own pockets. Until the state makes abusers take responsibility for their own actions, and comes clean with the public, nothing is going to change.

If President Trump gets his way, the amount of U.S. defense spending will increase by nearly 13% above their current level in 2019. Bloomberg Quint‘s Eric Watson and Tony Capaccio report on the proposed surge in U.S. defense spending.

President Donald Trump will propose $716 billion in defense spending in his fiscal 2019 budget request, a 7.2 percent from his request for this year that backs the Pentagon’s push for a major buildup, a U.S. official said.

The funding would include $597 billion for the Defense Department’s base budget, with the rest going for its war-fighting account and to other government programs such as the Energy Department’s nuclear weapons program, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in advance of the release of Trump’s second proposed budget next month.

The amount is a sharp increase from the $668 billion total Trump proposed last year for fiscal 2018 and also offered as a placeholder for fiscal 2019. Currently, the Pentagon is operating under stopgap funding at fiscal 2017 levels, which totaled $634 billion. The plan, reported earlier Friday by the Washington Post, represents a victory of defense hawks over those trying to constrain deficit spending.

From a deficit spending perspective, the proposed $82 billion increase in defense spending over their current level, which was set in 2017, could be twice as bad because congressional Democrats have been demanding a dollar for dollar increase in non-defense spending programs in the negotiations to increase the national debt ceiling. David Sherfinski of the Washington Times has that story:

Republicans and Democrats are supposedly close to a deal that would lift universally derided spending caps, but the negotiations have been hamstrung by the fact that the two sides can’t even agree on what constitutes “parity” between defense and non-defense funding.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says he won’t be bound by past “arbitrary” agreements that raised the caps equally for defense and non-defense discretionary spending, as he and other Republicans say a massive new military funding boost is needed to play catch-up after years of neglect.

Democrats, though, are again insisting on a dollar-for-dollar increase, saying certain domestic programs have taken under-the-radar hits from the caps and that defense hawks have consistently managed to sneak in extra money through a special war fund that’s exempt from the limits.

If you’re scratching your head wondering why non-defense spending should be in any way linked to defense spending increases, you’re not alone. Why, for example, would the need to address newly developing geopolitical crises elsewhere in the world require any new non-defense spending within the United States, when the two types of spending are almost completely independent of one another? But, that’s Washington D.C. thinking for you.

Better thinking would have members of the U.S. Congress working to close deals to reform the spending programs that have already put the U.S. government’s fiscal path onto an unsustainable trajectory, well before any new spending is added to worsen the nation’s fiscal situation. Alas, that concept seems to elude the politicians elected to the U.S. Congress, who would appear to have other priorities.

Before Jerry Brown’s 16th and final State of the State address Thursday, the New York Times wondered if he would use the address to “push for reforms in California’s notoriously dysfunctional tax system, hamstrung by Proposition 13 and a heavy reliance on volatile capital gains tax revenues.” Brown did no such thing but he did say the state’s new $5.2 billion gas tax was “essential,” and that he would “do everything in my power to defeat any repeal effort.”

Brown, 79, called for five million zero emission vehicles on the road by 2030 but he also used the speech to promote the state’s high-speed rail project. “Yes, it costs a lot of money,” Brown said, but it was “cheaper and more convenient than expanding airports and building new freeways.” The bullet train would be “fast, quiet and powered by renewable electricity and last 100 years” and it was already employing 1,500 construction workers.

Brown said California has “boldly embraced the Affordable Care Act,” enrolling 1.3 million into the state exchange. This depended on billions of federal dollars, and Brown said “Thank God for John McCain, Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins. Along with Democrats they prevailed and protected health care for tens of millions of Americans.” No word about the ACA being responsible for what health reporter Emily Bazar calls “widespread consumer misery.”

The governor cited pension reform as an example that “Some American governments can actually get things done.” On the other hand, Brown did not provide any numbers on the state’s fathomless pension debt, and did not repeat his recent warnings that at some point, government pensions would have to be cut back.

No data on student achievement turned up in the speech but Brown did say that “spending has dramatically recovered,” with a $5.8 billion increase in support of higher education. Brown said job one was “to support teachers and give them the training and freedom to teach as they know best.” Nothing about giving more educational choice to students and parents, especially in minority areas. Nothing about lowering the state’s income and sales taxes, highest in the United States. And nothing about regulatory reform, or unelected bodies such as the Coastal Commission that override voters and trample property rights.

Brown’s speech was a hit with legislators, who applauded heartily and chanted “Jerry! Jerry!” For their part, California taxpayers could be forgiven for believing that the true state of their state is much more statist than their recurring governor indicated.

As we noted, California has the highest top marginal income-tax rate of 13.3 percent and the highest base sales tax rate of 7.5 percent. The state also deploys a corporate tax rate of 8.84 percent but now state Democrats Kevin McCarty and Phil Ting want a constitution amendment that would slap any company with an annual net income of $1 million or more with “an additional surcharge of 7 percent, or half their savings from the recent federal tax cut.” This “dumb” idea, as even the Sacramento Bee put it, was a response to the recent federal tax cut, which reduced the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, and reduced income taxes for most workers. It was not, however, the only response.

Under senate boss Kevin de Leon’s Protect California Taxpayers Act, Californians would pay their state income taxes as though they were a charitable donation, and therefore fully deductible. The money would go into a California Excellence Fund run by the treasurer’s office and then into the state budget. Assemblyman Kevin Kiley wants to allow Californians to deduct their full state tax liability on their state tax return. This has less chance of passing then de Leon’s scheme and likewise makes no reduction in the actual rate of income tax California workers pay. And now McCarty and Ting want to add a 7 percent surcharge to the corporate rate. And don’t forget the new $5.2 billion tax on gasoline, diesel and vehicles.

State politicians are afflicted with taxoholism, a mental condition that assumes high taxes are always a good thing, resists tax reductions of any kind at any level, and automatically responds to a tax cut with punitive surcharges. In California, taxoholism has reached epidemic proportions.

In late 2017, the city of San Diego developed a public health crisis involving an outbreak of Hepatitis A among the city’s population of homeless residents, which arose as a result of personal contact with others who were openly defecating in public areas without facilities to wash their hands. At least 20 deaths in the city have been directly attributed to the outbreak of the virus.

In response, San Diego County sought to stop the spread of the outbreak of infection in part by placing temporary toilets in the downtown areas where many of the city’s homeless residents who had been infected with Hepatitis were congregating. At an estimated cost of anywhere from $85.80 per month for a basic unit to $225.80 per month for a unit fully compliant with the Americans With Disabilities Act, the cost of placing sixteen porta-potty facilities with hand-washing stations where they could be used by the city’s homeless population should have been a very cost-effective means to prevent additional deaths from the city’s Hepatitis A outbreak.

Except it wasn’t. And the reason it wasn’t is that the cost that San Diego County is incurring to provide security to its 16 porta-potties. Jeff McDonald of the San Diego Union Tribune reports:

Since last fall, when officials began fighting a hepatitis A outbreak by installing temporary toilets in areas where homeless people congregate, San Diego County has spent more than $500,000 on security guards to protect the rented restrooms.

The protection costs, thousands of dollars every day, are ongoing. The existing contracts, signed in September and October, have been amended multiple times and now run through February.

County leaders say the security is needed to prevent unwelcome elements often associated with the homelessness community where the infection was deadly — crime, drug use, prostitution and worse.

“We have placed 24/7 security at the portable restroom locations to maintain a safe and secure environment for both the users of the restrooms and the surrounding communities,” county spokesman Michael Workman said by email….

Through Jan. 10, the county spent $531,739.85 on security for the units. The costs continue to pile up at a rate of approximately $286 an hour, or $6,864 a day.

What kind of service is San Diego County getting for its $6,864 per day of around-the-clock porta-potty security?

The contracts call for security officers to monitor how many people use the restrooms. Guards also are told to make sure that only one person uses a bathroom at a time and they spend no more than 10 minutes inside.

One guard stationed along Riverside Drive in Lakeside said he makes a note of each bathroom visit during his eight-hour shift. He passes the notebook on to his successor at each change of shift. Someone from the county stops by regularly and snaps a photo of the latest written record.

Half-way through a recent shift, the report showed four people had used the bathroom.

“Most of the people who use the bathroom are just walking by,” said the guard, who did not want to be named because he feared losing his job. “They’re not homeless.”

If that doesn’t sound like a terribly efficient use of taxpayer dollars for preventing the spread of Hepatitis A among the city’s homeless residents, that’s because it isn’t. A quick internet search confirms that a fully furnished motel room in downtown San Diego can be rented for $72 per day, which would mean that up to 95 homeless people could be individually housed per day for what San Diego’s county government is spending just to protect its rented porta-potties 24 hours a day.

But at least San Diegans can now have secured access to a continuously-monitored porta-potty for up to 10 whole minutes at considerable public expense when they want it.