U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) is claiming Major League Baseball‘s decision to move the All-Star Game out of Atlanta will cost the city “100 million jobs.” There are just over 150 million Americans who are currently employed, so the Iowa Republicans Senator is claiming that effectively, two-thirds of working Americans will lose their jobs because of the move, which is false.
Major League Baseball pulled the game out of Atlanta in response to Republican Governor Brian Kemp signing what has been called “one of the most restrictive and dangerous anti-voter bills in the country.”
But the game is moving to Colorado, so there would be no jobs lost.
Senator Grassley is wrong. He might have been listening to an April 5 Fox News report, which claimed pulling out of Atlanta cost the city $100 million, but actual experts disagree, with one saying the amount is “a whole lot closer to zero than the $100m number Atlanta was throwing.”
The Guardian reports “Georgia’s $100m figure surely makes for a juicy cable-news chyron, the consensus among sports economists is these estimates are routinely exaggerated.”
“The rule of thumb that I always tell everyone,” economics professor Victor Matheson told The Guardian, “is just take whatever number the boosters are telling you, move the decimal one place to the left and you’ve probably got a pretty good guess.”
Grassley is getting scorched.