There are big happenings down in southern California. The Los Angeles Rams are demanding the local area people build them the City of Champions Stadium. Oh my! Here we go again. A big sports team owned by billionaires is demanding that the people pay for their luxury accommodations and acting like it is a grand favor. Oh the money that the team will bring in! Oh the jobs that will be created! A city would have to be a fool to pass up such a great opportunity!

We know about this con from David Cay Johnson’s wonderful book, Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill). These deals never make monetary sense. Localities spend a whole lot more than they get back. The local economy is not improved. It works like this. They build a big stadium. They build a big parking lot. People drive to the stadium. They spend money at the stadium. And then they drive home. Stadiums are often surrounded by squalor. But they do create jobs inside the stadium, right? Well, a little bit.

But remember: this is a zero sum game. Teams roam around from town to town looking for the best deal. So the jobs are going to be created somewhere. These are not new jobs. So the teams will go where the taxes are low, where the locality will pay for their stadiums, and where the minimum wage is low. Hooray! It’s the perfect environment for the billionaire who doesn’t feel that he is getting enough attention.

Michael Hiltzik wrote a good article last week, The Truth About Football Stadiums: Those Supposed Great New Jobs Are Bogus. In proposing the new stadium, its proponents claimed that it would created “10,465 full- and part-time jobs.” It sounds impressive, but those last three words create a semantic loophole so large you could push Aristotle’s Organon through it.

Most of the article deals with the fact that even those who get to work at stadiums are usually screwed out of their pay. For example, they aren’t able to park near the game, so by contract, they must take shuttles, but are not paid for this part of their jobs that clearly (and legally) should be paid. And the pay? Well, we don’t know if workers at the City of Champions Stadium will be paid beyond the going rate, but at this year’s Super Bowl, a typical worker was paid just $12.25 per hour. For one day. Think about that: one day!

Things are obviously different for baseball and basketball, but for football, there are a total of 8 games regular season played at any given stadium. Sure, there are occasionally other events, but they wouldn’t employ as many people and anyway, how many people are we talking about? Well, at Levi’s Stadium, there are a total of roughly 4,500 people employed on any day when the San Francisco 49ers are playing there. As Hiltzik noted: “mostly low-wage cooks, waiters, janitors, security guards, parking attendants, and ticket takers.” As for the high wage jobs, “Permanent stadium jobs in departments such as marketing and sales number only about 60.”

Where does the 10,465 number come from? It’s just a fantasy. But then it all is. Football (or any other form of entertainment) is a fungible — easily replaced by another commodity. Sure, if football were taken away, people would miss it. But they would find other ways to entertain themselves. I have a lot of ideas for how to improve professional sports. But the first step we should take should be one we make for all businesses. No locality in the United States should be allowed to give any business any incentive whatsoever. It is unfair. It gives billionaires advantages that the rest of us have to pay for. It’s an outrage.

It looks like this election is going to be between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. In general, I’ve thought that Bernie Sanders would have been the better candidate against Trump. Now I don’t especially think that. For one thing, I’ve noted of late that Sanders doesn’t have the greatest campaign. He is right to say that he’s just the figurehead of a movement. And that movement is made up of people like me — people who feel the the Democratic Party has moved way too far to the right. And in that way, Sanders is a supporter of me, not the other way around.

But now, I’m thinking that Hillary Clinton really will be hard for any Republican to beat. I was very impressed with both Clinton and Sanders Thursday night. But I have to admit, every time I see Clinton she makes me think what I thought of Bill Clinton: there’s someone who the American people can think of as a president. She’s extremely good at all this. She walks a fine line that wouldn’t be necessary if she weren’t a woman, and she does it brilliantly. As I’ve stated from the beginning, she’s not my first choice, but she’s a fine choice.

Meanwhile, last week, BuzzFeed reported, In 2002, Donald Trump Said He Supported Invading Iraq. In September 2002, Howard Stern asked if he was in favor of the Iraq War, and Trump said, “Yeah, I guess so. I wish the first time it was done correctly.” This isn’t a surprise at all. The vast majority of people supported the war at that time. What’s more, a vast number of people today who did support the war back then claim that they didn’t. And you can say a lot of things about Trump, but the truth is that he is a typical American:

I don’t think this is much going to hurt Donald Trump in the Republican primary. Nothing seems to hurt him in the Republican primary. But the opposition research on Donald Trump has to be so ridiculously extensive that he would be dead meat in the general election if he weren’t already deeply disliked. I understand that he was deeply disliked in the Republican Party before he started winning. But the truth is that he is still still deeply disliked in the Republican Party. Of course, they will all fall in line behind him eventually. But the only reason he is popular is because he willing to be deeply offensive to the one demographic group that the Republicans absolutely must get 30% to 40% of the vote from : Latinos.

So I have to provide my standard disclaimer: if the economy tanks, the Republicans have a really good shot at giving the Republicans the White House. But barring that, I don’t see them winning the election. Their only hope on that front would be to make this election on national security. (That would be ridiculous given how safe we are here at home, but stranger things have happened.) On that front, Bernie Sanders might be vulnerable. But Clinton wouldn’t be. If this is a national security election, Clinton is the best candidate there is. (That’s one of my biggest concerns about her!)

So the election is shaping up to be one that the Democrats win by default. If they don’t, it is because they screwed it up. But assuming Clinton is the candidate, I just want to say a word to my fellow Sanders supporters: you have to vote for Clinton. There never was going to be a political revolution. If you want to see real change in this country, then you have to fight for it, not this election cycle, but for the next four, five, six election cycles. Imagine how different things would have been in young people showed up at the polls in 2010 and Obama had had another two, four, or six years with a Democratic Congress? Whether Clinton or Sanders, or even Trump or Cruz, wins on 8 November 2016, the work doesn’t stop. It continues on and on until some things like universal healthcare and guaranteed income are truly taken for granted.