Do you like having professional sports teams in Cleveland? Of course you do.

Is it worth investing public money to help pay for the places they play?

Supporters and opponents of the plan to use public money to fix up Quicken Loans Arena are in the midst of airing their points of view on the value of spending public money on the project. They packed the Cuyahoga County Council chamber twice in February and likely will do the same before Cleveland City Council this month.

In a perfect world, no city, county or state would give any business, including sports teams, a financial incentive to bring its talents to, or stay in, a particular community. But until every community signs on and sticks to a no-poaching pledge, incentives will be offered.

The financial incentive game used to be called "smokestack chasing." It has been going on at least since the Great Depression, when Mississippi started its "Balance Agriculture with Industry" program, and the state's communities started waving cash in front of northern manufacturers to induce them to build plants in the South.

The giveaways, of course, are greatest to sports teams, even though their owners are among the wealthiest people in the country. Few people noticed, much less raised a ruckus, last week when the state of Ohio and the city of Brooklyn gave tax breaks worth more than $1 million to a medical supply company called Inogen Inc. to open an Eastern sales office and warehouse here instead of Michigan, Pennsylvania or some other state.

But the ties to sports teams are strong; witness the million people who came to a parade after the Cavaliers won the NBA championship last June. And team owners, like Cavs principal owner Dan Gilbert, are just as competitive as the players on the court. Each is vying to have a team that both wins a championship and makes the most money. Getting a subsidy from the hometown is like winning a playoff game on the way to the money championship.

Certainly, the activists who have spoken before county council have a valid point. How can the community come up with money for a sports arena, they ask, without also finding money to help find jobs for the unemployed, rebuild struggling neighborhoods and improving health and social services?

However, the Greater Cleveland Congregations (GCC), one of the activist groups questioning the arena deal, is trying to have it both ways. "We love the team, we hate the deal," its leaders and members have repeated to county officials. Their answer is to somehow include money for their causes in the deal. They are unclear how they will make that happen.

On the other side, the argument in favor of the deal that says The Q is an economic engine for the community is built on best-case economics. People are attracted to events at the arena, generating admission taxes and paying salaries, and that visit triggers spending outside the building, which generates more payroll and more taxes. But would that spending disappear if the arena went dark? No, and academics and consultants are split on which side of that analysis does a city come out ahead.

So should the city and county councils come up with the money?

Three times voters in Cuyahoga County have answered that question with the same answer: "yes." In 1990, voters agreed to a tax on alcohol and tobacco. They agreed to extend it in 1995 and 2014 to pay for the construction and upkeep of FirstEnergy Stadium and the upkeep of Progressive Field and Quicken Loans Arena. In 2015, that tax generated more than $13 million to pay off bonds issued for work on those three buildings.

Given the high cost of keeping sports teams where they are, and the lack of a clear public benefit, a community's willingness to financially support its sports teams isn't apparent on a spreadsheet. Rather, it's tied into intangibles like civic pride and a kind of kinship that brings joy when a team wins and despair when it loses. Who hasn't lorded a local victory over a brother, sister of friend from a city on the losing end? (I have a brother in San Francisco.)

Actually, cigarette smokers are subsidizing local entertainment venues even further, through a tax on every pack approved by voters a decade ago and renewed by voters in 2015. As a result, since 2007 cigarette smokers contributed $172.8 million to fund hundreds of arts and cultural programs, ranging from the Cleveland Orchestra to a dance performance by elementary school-age kids at the Fatima Family Center on Cleveland's East Side.

And let's not forget the $465 million sunk into the new convention center and adjoining health center. That investment is being paid for by an added sales tax, approved by county commissioners, not voters, in 2009.

But should Gilbert, the Cavs' owner, endow what GCC, which says it represents 100,000 county residents, wants: a $35 million Community Equity Fund? Or should the group try to build support for a tax increase to pay for expanded services?

That seems unlikely.

Asked that question and another about the group's plans if its proposal is ignored, James Pearlstein, the group's lead organizer, said they have a plan that he wasn't prepared to reveal. All he would say is, "There will be hell to pay."

Let's hope that's more rhetoric than threat.

Jay Miller is Crain's government and economic development reporter.