I attended a baseball game last week at the still relatively new $1.3 billion Yankee Stadium, subsidized handsomely by taxpayers. It includes a Metro North rail station so people can get to the games more conveniently. Across the Hudson, the brand new Jets-Giants stadium, another billion-dollar-plus goliath, just opened with a special rail link for fans, connecting into the city paid for by you know who. But coincidentally the New Jersey governor blocks construction of a new rail tunnel into the city which would serve everyday commuters trying to earn a living.

In Michigan, the state university has just added 10,000 seats and skyboxes to its football coliseum costing a quarter of a billion dollars, while nearby Detroit contemplates letting swaths of its debilitated urban core go back to seed. At the University of Florida, an institution not to be confused with any Ivy League school, the athletic director and his coaches have three private jets at their disposal to help recruit player talent and the women's softball coach makes $250,000 a year. That’s all nice in a state where housing values have declined precipitously and the biggest private employer runs a giant theme park. Meanwhile, cities around the country still pay off costs on stadiums dating from the 1970s, which have been demolished and replaced by new taxpayer supported facilities.

At the same time, we note attendance for the MLB and the NFL is slipping and the most expensive seats go begging. Part of the reason is excessive ticket prices—do team owners realize we’re in 2010 not 2007? But of course, that’s the problem. These stadiums were conceived in the “anything goes” pre-housing bust times where cheap debt and ever rising values could finance anything, including our pleasure domes. Like recently completed condo towers and office buildings, their economics let alone reason for existence has been upended by now apparent realities. These stadiums will go down with Hummers and McMansions as the most telling evidence of our collective sociological madness and the skewed priorities, which have put the U.S. in our monumental debt rut. Just spend and borrow, buy more and bigger, and distract yourself by paying hundreds and in some cases thousands of dollars to attend sporting events, while the country ebbs into a sink hole of less.