Quick: guess how much more the revenue generated by Wal-Mart is compared to the revenue generated by the state of Missouri in the most recent fiscal years for each.

The correct answer is about 60 times as much—the global retail giant brought in over $476 billion in its fiscal year that ended Jan. 31 of last year while Missouri’s general revenue in the fiscal year that concluded June 30 was $8 billion.

The St. Louis Rams play at the Edward Jones Dome, for which the state of Missouri pays half the cost, and St. Louis City and County split the other half. None of the $24 million spent annually on maintenance and construction debt comes from the franchise’s owner, Stan Kroenke, who is married to Ann Walton Kroenke, who is the daughter of Wal-Mart co-founder Bud Walton.

The Rams are playing on a year-to-year lease at the Dome and inching toward Los Angeles, and Stan Kroenke moved forward with plans to build a stadium on land he owns there. In response, a consortium of St. Louis leaders that includes Anheuser-Busch executive Dave Peacock—with the advising of Mayor Francis Slay and Missouri Governor Jay Nixon—has proposed a new riverfront stadium that would cost nearly $1 billion. $350 million would come from an extension of the public’s bond payments on the Dome, with Kroenke covering merely $100 million more than taxpayers.

Yes, we know that contrasting revenues between Wal-Mart and Missouri is a bit of a false equivalency, but the point is that the Kroenkes have money to pay for a stadium themselves—lots of it. Stan Kroenke is a rich man in his own right—in fact, he is the 89th wealthiest person in the United States, worth $5.7 billion according to Forbes. He owns a slew of professional franchises, including the NBA’s Denver Nuggets, the NHL’s Colorado Avalanche, MLS’s Colorado Rapids and English Premier League soccer club Arsenal.

The Kroenkes are Columbia, Mo., natives, but they are not responsible for public services like preserving roads, schools, housing, health agencies, courts and other institutions that help society function. Professional sports stadiums do not help society function, but they certainly can make society happier. The Rams have not made anyone in St. Louis very happy for over a decade, and that’s before even thinking about what the city, county and state pay to host them.

Meanwhile, countless economic analyses have shown that sports stadiums do not generate the money for cities that politicians, developers and chambers of commerce would have you believe. The money goes to owners, sponsors, players, the lucky few local businesses—anywhere but the public. The Edward Jones Dome is a perfect example: pitched as a modern, multipurpose investment in St. Louis when built 20 years ago on the public dime, it is now debt-ridden and outdated.

If the latest Rams charade sounds like insanity, it is. But it’s business as usual in the NFL and professional sports, where plutocrats like Kroenke capitalize on demand for big league games to squeeze money out of local and state governments. Even the mayor of Glendale, Ariz., which is hosting the Super Bowl this weekend and whose tourist website touts the event as an “economic engine,” has admitted that the town actually loses money from hosting it.

We assume that a learned man such as Kroenke reads the newspapers and is aware of the great struggles facing both St. Louis and his home state far beyond football. We idealistically hope that he realizes what a modest act of philanthropy it would be to finance his own stadium here and keep the Rams in St. Louis himself.

Sadly, it’s probably just idealism.