I really dont have a lot vested in this since it's NY and I dont live there.
I do think it's in bad taste however.
It's in bad taste for the Park51 people to want to make use of a program in
exactly the way the program was explicitly set up to do?
The govt loan story though caught my attention. I know it's supposedly for other functions and all, still dont agree with it. No more than I would if it was a Christian or ____?
Were you upset about the use of funds for qualifying non-profit organizations via a bond process (something used not just in New York, but all over the country)
before you learned that it was a Muslim group that was going to apply for this process? Such as, for instance, when the NYCIDA program provided $26 million to The Convent of the Sacred Heart school in Manhattan?
Because, again, the Park51 people aren't doing anything new or unique here, but taking advantage of an
existing program specifically set up for things like this. It seems a little like closing the barn door after the horse has escaped to get upset about this bond process being used
now to provide money for tax-exempt religious groups...
Plus, the fact that it's a bond process means that they aren't actually getting government money, in the sense that most people talk about. The way it works is that special bonds are authorized and sold by the government (or, in this case, a private local development agency empowered by the government to issue those bonds), and then those proceeds are lent to the borrower. And after that, the borrower has to pay back the money. And since the bond sales are done not as actual government-backed bonds, but as bonds tied to the borrower, if the people who bought the bonds expecting to be paid back don't get their money, the government doesn't have to pay them. And since the money lent comes solely from the sales of bonds, the government itself isn't actually out any cash - all it does is monitor the process and vet people who apply for the process to make sure they at least have a good likelihood of paying back the bond funds.
The advantage for doing this rather than just selling, say, stock, is that the bondholders get no say in the organization itself (any more than the purchasers of, say, Savings Bonds gain extra influence in the government) but they do get a return on their investment in the form of interest when the bond is repaid, and the organization gets a loan at a much lower interest rate than they would with a normal commercial loan. In the case of bonds for a non-profit tax-exempt group like Park51, the advantages are even greater, since both the loan they get and the interest they pay to bondholders are tax exempt, so neither party has to worry about that.
