States and cities across the United States have used generous taxpayer subsidies to build new sports facilities. But as ThinkProgress has noted, those deals often fail to live up to the economic promises cities make in order to get taxpayers to sign off on the funding. Instead, cities are often left in debt, even as the franchises come calling for more generous deals.

Most of the research proving that these deals aren’t friendly to taxpayers, however, has focused on football and baseball facilities and not on basketball arenas, which are more often built with multi-use purposes in mind. But a new study from George Washington University’s Geoffrey Propheter looked exclusively at basketball arenas and found similar results: the arenas generally don’t add economic value to a city, and in certain circumstances, they can actually hurt a city’s economy, as The Atlantic Cities’ Richard Florida writes:

The results suggest that basketball arenas do not add economic value on their own but instead are highly dependent on the local economic, social, and cultural context where they are located. The basic version of the model, covering three decades from 1979 to 2009, found “no statistically significant association between having an NBA arena or an NBA franchise and MSA regional personal income.” [...]

The cities with the newest arenas took the biggest economic hit — a “decline in per capita income of about $2,430, a larger decline than in any other period, according to the study.” Alarmingly, the magnitudes of the income declines in this study “are generally larger than what has previously been observed,” the study finds.

Taxpayer subsidies often wipe out miniscule economic gains some cities do see, and in other instances, economic gains were actually “income transfers from the suburban area around the central city,” meaning the metro area as a whole did not benefit.

Arenas, Propheter concludes, “are not primary catalysts of economic development but are instead economic complements,” more likely an effect of economic development rather than a cause. Still, cities around the country continue to peg their economic hopes on these projects, even as evidence mounts that the returns almost never justify the investment.

Yesterday, a group of Catholic nuns called on Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney to spend a day with them to learn about the plight of America’s poorest citizens. Now, another religious group has made a similar call.

The Franciscan Action Network, a group of Franciscan friars and sisters, released a statement Wednesday asking Romney and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the author of the House GOP budget, to join them in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to “spend time with the poor.” Like NETWORK, the national Catholic social justice group that started the nun’s push yesterday, the Franciscan Action Network took issue with the misleading ad about welfare reform the Romney campaign released this week.

FAN is “disturbed by the demeaning campaign ad and conversation about welfare by the Romney campaign,” it said in a release. The group also criticized Romney for endorsing the House GOP budget, which cuts programs that benefit the poor and middle class. Romney’s ad is hypocritical, the group says, because it talks about “ensuring that low-income people are working” even as the Romney-endorsed GOP budget cuts job training programs for the poor:

Rhett Engelking, OFS, a lay Franciscan in Milwaukee, WI, who works with the poor in hunger relief and mental health, invites both Gov. Romney and Rep. Paul Ryan (whose district is nearby) to spend time with the poor in Milwaukee and with the Franciscans who work with them. He said, “Wisconsin is getting a lot of attention as a swing state, and political leaders talking about the poor in demeaning ways while proposing to cut job training programs should spend time with the people they are affecting.”

The House GOP budget has been pilloried by religious groups since its release in the spring. Religious leaders called it an “immoral disaster” that “robs the poor” when it was first released, and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops circulated letters through Congress calling the budget’s cuts to food assistance programs “unjustified and wrong.” Catholic nuns targeted the budget during a nine-state bus tour this summer.

When Ryan released the budget plan in April, Romney said it would be “marvelous” if the Senate joined the House in passing it.

ThinkProgress has chronicled the ways in which the House Republican budget, authored by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), targets programs that benefit the poor and middle class to find most of its spending cuts, even as it gives the rich and corporations $3 trillion in tax breaks. The budget also would hit America’s middle class in another way: by decimating state and local budgets, as a new report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities details.

The budget’s cuts to federal discretionary spending would cause reductions in the amount the federal government contributes to state and local governments, causing deep cuts to state programs that deal with transportation, education, housing, public safety, and the environment, according to CBPP. Those decreases would be even bigger than the reductions caused by the Budget Control Act, the bipartisan debt limit deal reached last summer that sets caps on federal spending levels. Under the GOP budget, federal funding to states would be reduced to less than half its historical average, CBPP found:

As difficult as the current spending caps will be for states and localities, the Ryan budget would impose much deeper cutbacks. Since 1976, federal discretionary funding to states and localities has averaged 1.4 percent of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). By 2021, the Ryan budget would reduce this funding to about 0.6 percent of GDP, less than half the historical average and well below the BCA caps.

The GOP budget would cut Medicaid funding for states by 34 percent by 2022; it would make 22 percent cuts to state and local budgets in other areas, causing a reduction of $28 billion in state funding by 2014 and a total of $247 billion in cuts by 2022, CBPP found. That would cause decimating cuts to state education programs like Head Start and Title I (high poverty) schools; housing programs that provide rental assistance to the poor; health programs like the Women, Infant, and Children (WIC) grants and Community Health Centers; and public safety programs that help hire police officers and firefighters.

“In theory, policymakers could spare state and local funding and take all of the required cuts from purely federal areas of non-defense discretionary spending,” CBPP writes. “In reality, there is no chance that would occur, as it would entail extremely deep cuts” to programs like veterans’ health benefits and Social Security that aren’t likely to get the axe.

The Great Recession’s crunch on state and local budgets is already dragging down the American economy: in the last three years, more than 680,000 public sector workers, including hundreds of thousands of teachers and public safety officials, have lost their jobs, the worst three-year period for government job losses on record. That has increased unemployment and made it harder for states, cities, and their residents to recover from the recession. Rather than providing a “Path to Prosperity” for states, as Ryan asserts his budget will, the GOP’s insistence on deep spending cuts would only exacerbate the pain they are already feeling.

Newt Gingrich has spent the last two days doing interview after interview to discuss the Romney campaign’s disingenuous attack claiming that the Obama administration is out to “gut welfare reform.” But during an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Gingrich was presented with the actual text of the Department of Health and Human Services regulation that the administration is adopting, and had to acknowledge that the directive, as written, doesn’t gut welfare. “None of us believe them,” was all Gingrich could say.

Gingrich made a similar admission Wednesday night, when he all but all but admitted to CNN’s Anderson Cooper that a Romney campaign ad about welfare reform has no evidence behind it:

COOPER: But under the — I mean, this ad said under Obama’s plan you wouldn’t have to work, you wouldn’t have to train for a job, they just send you your welfare check. There’s no evidence of that at all.

GINGRICH: Well, given that this is an administration which has maximized the increase in dependency, maximized the number of people on food stamps, maximized the effort to get people to rely on the government, there’s also no evidence that once the waiver system is in place that you could rely on this administration to defend work. [...]

COOPER: I want to just try to clarify this. You do think that the actual wording under Obama’s plan, you wouldn’t have to work, you wouldn’t have to train for a job, they just send you your welfare check, that is not factually correct?

GINGRICH: We have no proof today, but I would say to you under Obama’s ideology it is absolutely true that he would be comfortable sending a lot of people checks for doing nothing. I believe that totally.

Watch it:

Romney’s ad claims that, “Under Obama’s plan, you wouldn’t have to work and wouldn’t have to train for a job. They just send you your welfare check.” In reality, the administration is simply granting states waivers to experiment with their job programs, not ending them. One of welfare reform’s conservative architects even called the Republican attacks “exaggerated.”

And none of this political debate grapples with the fact that today’s welfare programs were wholly inadequate during the Great Recession, getting aid to just a fraction of those families who needed it.