Of course he'd say it's an economic stimulus, wouldn't he?

Vikings owner Zygi Wilf is now repositioning his attempt to get the taxpayers of Minnesota to build him a new football stadium as "economic stimulus":

With the state and federal governments looking for ways to jump-start the economy, a New Jersey businessman has an ambitious public works project he says will create more than 5,500 jobs and provide $500 million or more to local contractors.

The businessman is Zygi Wilf, principal owner of the Minnesota Vikings.

The project: A $954 million, state-of-the-art stadium for his football team in downtown Minneapolis — to be constructed using more than $635 million in public money.

"Why not? The Vikings are a public asset," said Lester Bagley, the Vikings' vice president in charge of stadium development. "This is going to create an economic boost."

An excellent example of Frederic Bastiat's Broken Window Fallacy in economics:

The parable describes a shopkeeper whose window is broken by a little boy. Everyone sympathizes with the man whose window was broken, but pretty soon they start to suggest that the broken window makes work for the glazier, who will then buy bread, benefiting the baker, who will then buy shoes, benefiting the cobbler, etc. Finally, the onlookers conclude that the little boy was not guilty of vandalism; instead he was a public benefactor, creating economic benefits for everyone in town.

[. . .]

The fallacy of the onlookers' argument is that they considered only the benefits of purchasing a new window, but they ignored the cost to the shopkeeper. As the shopkeeper was forced to spend his money on a new window, he could not spend it on something else. For example, the shopkeeper might have preferred to spend the money on bread and shoes for himself, but now cannot so enrich the baker and cobbler because he must fix his window.

Thus, the child did not bring any net benefit to the town. Instead, he made the town poorer by at least the value of one window, if not more. His actions benefited the glazier, but at the expense not only of the shopkeeper, but the baker and cobbler as well.

The spending that is seen weighs more heavily in most peoples' values than the spending that cannot take place because it has been pre-empted by the forced spending. In Minnesota's case, too many people see the government's "contribution" only for the positives (new jobs, new orders for materials, etc.), ignoring the other things which cannot be obtained because the money has gone to support a billionaire's quest for a new stadium.