LAST May the school board in Cobb County, a wealthy county just north of Atlanta, approved a budget that furloughed employees, "slimmed down central administration staff" and lost 182 teachers through attrition. Declining property values and budget cuts by the state left the schools with an $86.2m deficit. Cobb's schools avoided even deeper cuts by using $41m in savings, and will probably need to trim at least another $60m next year. Other counties, faced with a similar shortfall and a similarly wealthy populace, might have timidly proposed a modest tax hike, but Cobb County is tea-party country: its congressional representatives include Phil Gingrey, an OBGYN who thought Todd Akin was "partly right" when he said that pregnancy cannot result from "legitimate rape"; and Tom Price, another conservative doctor. A tax hike would have been political suicide. Still, it seems that Cobb residents are perfectly willing to use public funds to pay for truly worthy causes. No, not educating their children. I'm talking about baseball. Last week the Atlanta Braves announced that they will leave Turner Field, their 17-year-old downtown stadium, when their lease expires at the end of 2016, and will move to a new park to be built in Cobb County, at the already-bottlenecked intersection of two major highways (I-75 and I-285). The Braves complained that Turner Field needed $150m in "infrastructure work alone", which would not "significantly enhance the fan experience". The new location puts them closer to more of their season-ticket holders, most of whom come from the city's rich northern suburbs.

Here's how it will work: the Braves will buy 60 acres of land, and give 15 of them to the Cobb County stadium authority. Those 15 acres, on which the stadium and 2,000 parking spaces will be built, will be exempt from property taxes. The Braves will develop the rest into a "mixed-use, 365-day destination", on which they will pay tax and from which, of course, they will keep the revenue. Cobb County will pay around $300m over the next 30 years. Relative pittances will come from those old stadium slush funds: taxes on rental cars and hotels. Mayors love them because they can tell their constituents that only visitors will pay them, though in Cobb's case that doesn't quite hold up. Visitors may be paying for hotels, but probably not for rental cars—Cobb is too far from the airport. Increased hotel and property taxes in the area to be developed around the stadium will add more, but the bulk—$260m over the next 30 years—will come from a "reallocation" of existing property-tax revenues. This lets Cobb's executive boast that there will be no property tax increases.

That is technically true, but essentially malarkey: the reallocated taxes are currently paying for parks, and were due to sunset in 2017 or 2018. So homeowners may not pay more in the future than they pay today, but they will pay more in the future than they otherwise would have. And this does not even consider what else the county could have done with that $260m, had they decided to keep the tax in place and not funnel it into a sports team's already-deep pockets. Neil deMause at the invaluable Field of Schemes blog explains that Cobb taxpayers are probably looking at losses as high as $200m. Kasim Reed, Atlanta's mayor and an expert knife-twister, told a press conference that "we can't spend money that liberally in the city of Atlanta. We are fiscal conservatives here." (Of course, Atlanta will throw hundreds of millions of public dollars at a new stadium for their football team, but better one white elephant, I suppose, than two.)

Then there is the symbolism of Atlanta's baseball team leaving the city whose name it bears—the city in which Hank Aaron braved death threats while breaking Babe Ruth's home-run record—and following the well-trod white-flight path northward. Cobb County's Republican chairman said that transport must focus on "moving cars in and around Cobb and surrounding counties from the north and the east where most Braves fans travel from, and not moving people into Cobb by rail from Atlanta." Hear that, you Atlanta Braves fans classless enough to come from the city of Atlanta? Keep your filthy trains to yourselves. We got a nice neighbourhood here; you just move along.

(Photo credit: AFP)