Regardless of your political leanings, this year's election saw a lot of wins and losses. But here's a big win for Californians: Voters rejected raising hotel taxes to pay for a new stadium for the NFL's San Diego Chargers.

Ballot Measure C received only 43 percent support from San Diego County voters. (It needed at least 66.7 percent to pass.) The Chargers' loyal fan base is justifiably worried about the team's future in San Diego, but from a pure policy standpoint, they dodged a financial bullet.

Why? In order to attract professional sports teams, or prevent them from moving elsewhere, cities often sweeten the pot through tax breaks, subsidies or both. Taxpayers foot the bill for these special favors.

Advocates argue that building taxpayer-funded stadiums is a boon for the local economy, but we need to look at the bigger picture. Impartial economists who have done the math generally agree that subsidizing stadiums brings more costs into a community than revenue.

In a study conducted last year, sports economics professor Dennis Coates found that having a major sports stadium does not raise personal per capita income or wages for the people living in that community. Surprisingly, the evidence shows that sports franchises may sometimes have harmful effects on wages and income.

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This result seems counterintuitive, but it's important to remember that any public funds spent subsidizing local sports teams are resources that can't be spent on the core functions of government, like public safety, or are otherwise unavailable to taxpayers to pay for what they individually want.

Even more frightening is the possibility of the local government being trapped into paying off loans used to build old stadiums after teams have left for other cities or moved into newer stadiums. When the New York Giants and the New York Jets made their way to the new Meadowlands Stadium, the old Giants Stadium was demolished and turned into a parking lot – a parking lot with $110 million in debt still attached.

New York's experience is not an outlier. Last year, Seattle finally finished paying off debt on the multimillion-dollar Kingdome Stadium, 15 years after it was demolished, and Philadelphia was still paying for the public debt on Veteran's Stadium 10 years after it was torn down. However, the problem is not that payments are still being made on phantom sports stadiums, but that public money was used to subsidize a private enterprise to begin with.

The core problem with using public money to subsidize sports teams is that they are "flighty firms" who are incentivized to move to new cities when they can get a better deal, or who can use the potential of flight to extract a better deal out of their home city. The Chargers are a good example. The ballot measures were an attempt to appease the team into staying in San Diego after the team eyed moving to Los Angeles but lost out to the Rams (who left St. Louis taxpayers holding $144 million in stadium debt and maintenance costs when the team relocated).

Will the Chargers stay in San Diego? There's a strong likelihood that the team may move to Los Angeles to join the Rams after all. But that's actually a good thing, because sports teams, like other private companies, should be free to move to whatever location is best for their business. The problem only occurs when public money is used to support a private interest.