Feds back Red Sox bonds

Lee County taxpayers won't be the only ones backing a spring-training stadium for the Boston Red Sox. Turns out, the nation's taxpayers are on the hook, too.

Lee County recently sold $81.2 million worth of municipal bonds to build a new spring-training stadium for the Boston Red Sox, Bloomberg reported. The baseball team's owner, commodities hedge-fund billionaire John Henry, threatened to take the team to Sarasota or somewhere else unless Lee County agreed to build a new stadium to replace the aging one in Fort Myers the Sox practice in today.

But it turns out the federal government played a big role in subsidizing the bonds whose proceeds will be used to build the stadium, Bloomberg reported recently.