Let me say that again.
The National Football League is tax exempt.
The same NFL that is a nearly $7 BILLION business doesn’t pay taxes. Your NFL, the one that shakes down cities for stadia and Super Bowls underwritten by taxpayers doesn’t pay a lick in taxes. Freaking amazing! How did that happen?
Apparently I’ve been lost under a rock on this one. The issue first surfaced a year ago when league commissioner Roger Goodell resisted releasing salary figures of his executive staff as part of its disclosure statement. It’s back a year later as the NFL Players Association’s new president, Washington attorney DeMaurice Smith, hinted that he may make it an issue in upcoming contract negotiations. An NPR report March 18th indicated that Mr. Smith’s ties to the Obama administration may make this more than just posturing.
Go ahead Mr. Smith. Please. Make our day! We need a little Outrage on Ball Street here. How can it be in the day and age when the Robber Barons of high finance have been exposed for the shortcomings that ruined an economy that a powerful mega-business like the NFL can skate by without paying taxes? For answers look at this column by Rick Cohen, National Correspondent for The Nonprofit Quarterly. Mr. Cohen lays out the hypocrisy of the arrangement in two key paragraphs: "Tax Exempt Monopoly: The NFL might want to remember that it has the unusual distinction of not only being a tax exempt multi-billion dollar corporation, it is a tax exempt monopoly. Ask any city that has had to pony up public subsidies for stadiums in order to prevent the NFL from using its monopoly powers to move teams from one city to another. Congress gave the NFL and the other leagues protections against market forces, but the leagues have deployed these protections as monopolistic bargaining chips against the American taxpayer. Little did taxpayers know that in negotiating with the NFL monopoly, unlike the MLB monopoly, the NFL was also tax exempt—and even able to issue tax exempt bonds as a nonprofit to boot! Blurred Nonprofit/For-Profit Lines: Nonprofits as complicated as the National Football League require more disclosure, not less, particularly when they are so much more like for-profit business juggernauts operating behind the nonprofit cloak. As NFL Commissioner, Goodell not only runs the National Football League, but other exempt entities such as the Professional Football Players Insurance Trust, the NFL Youth Football Fund, the NFL Non-Player Insurance Trust, the NFL Management Council, the NFL Disaster Relief Fund, NFL Charities, and the NFL Alumni Dire Need Charitable Fund, and non-exempt entities such as NFL Ventures LP, NFL Ventures Inc., NFL Properties LLC, NFL Productions LLC, NFL International LLC, and NFL Enterprises LLC. This complex array of nonprofit and for-profit and limited profit entities is the emerging crisis area for IRS oversight of the sector." Really. Please define suffering for us Mr. Commissioner. We here in Arizona are seeing a lot with an economy hooked fully to the foreclosure crisis and dropping like the proverbial rock. Yet, in an audit released last week, we learned what sweetheart deals the NFL’s Cardinals have here courtesy our own Arizona government, deals any business or homeowner would kill for. Would you like your everyday expenses covered by taxpayers? How about help retiring your debt? Why not a screaming deal on rent for a state of the art home? Mr. Smith, get our tax money, please. Commissioner Goodell, of course, doesn’t agree. He even questions the amazing profitability of his league saying in his annual State of the League address that it’s suffering from this economic downturn too.
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