Salt Lake Mayor Rocky Anderson says he's confident his city will prevail. But neither he nor anyone else involved in this has yet to present any evidence to show why it is in the public's interest to help build a stadium for a team. On the contrary, scholarly evidence continues to mount showing it would be a detriment.

Last week, the CATO Foundation released a new study authored by Dennis Coates, an economics professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Brad R. Humphreys, an associate professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. The study focused on the current debate over where to build a baseball stadium for the new major league team in Washington, D.C., but it applies to any city.

The study notes that everyone who touts the benefit of a pro sports team looks at how the money spent on sports will ripple through the community. But they overstate this benefit because they ought to look only at "benefits that would not have occurred in the absence of the stadium." Economists call this the "substitution effect." People normally spend money on a movie or a dinner somewhere else in town. Instead, they decide to go to a soccer game. That really isn't new spending. The restaurant and the theater actually lose money.

Thirty-seven metropolitan areas, including Salt Lake City, were examined in the study. The scholars demonstrated that the presence of a team "had a statistically significant negative impact on the level of real per capita income" in those cities during a period that stretched from 1969 to 1996. The entire study can be found at www.cato.org.

If teams want to locate here, they should use existing facilities or pay for their own. But that's heresy, too.

Some people call sports the new national religion, and when a movement that powerful comes along, it's easy for the clergy to simply ignore the intellectuals. After all, an economist doesn't cover himself in war paint and pose shirtless for the camera on game day.

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Jay Evensen is editor of the Deseret Morning News editorial page. E-mail: even@desnews.com