Are You Ready for Some Taxpayer-Subsidized Nonprofit Sportsball?

Are You Ready for Some Taxpayer-Subsidized Nonprofit Sportsball?
Jan. 5, 2014 11:00 am

With the NFL playoffs underway and the BCS National Championship Game kicking off tomorrow night, now seems like a perfect time to remind every American just how screwed up the economics behind these games actually are.

Here is the original text from the Dec. 2, 2013 video:

Whether you like football or not – whether you’ve ever bought a ticket to a high school, college, or NFL game – you’re paying for it.

That’s one of the takeaways from The King of Sports: Football’s Impact on America, Gregg Easterbrook’s fascinating new book on the cultural, economic, and political impact of America’s most popular and lucrative sport.

“The [state-supported] University of Maryland charges each…undergraduate $400 a year to subsidize the football program,” says Easterbrook, who notes that only a half-dozen or so college teams are truly self-supporting. Even powerhouse programs such as the University of Florida’s pull money from students and taxpayers. “They do it,” he says, “because they can get away with it.”

At the pro level, billionaire team owners such as Paul Allen of the Seattle Seahawks and Shahid Khan of the Jacksonville Jaguars benefit from publicly financed stadiums for which they pay little or nothing while reaping all revenue. Easterbrook also talks about how the lobbyists managed to get the NFL chartered as a nonprofit by amending tax codes designed for chambers of commerce and trade organizations.

https://reason.com/blog/2014/01/05/are-you-ready-for-some-taxpayer-subsidiz