College Sports Need Their Tax-Exempt Status Revoked | Hacker News Reader

College Sports Need Their Tax-Exempt Status Revoked

bloomberg.com

128 pointsJumpCrisscross32 comments

One interpretation of this: back when only 10% of the US population had a college degree, the elites gave their children's country clubs, aka colleges, a tax exempt status. Now that almost 40% of the US population has a college degree, the policy has a more serious impact than ever before, and feels even less fair than in the past.

It's so wild that, presumably, college educated people have this take. It's practically the only schooling that's worth a damn beyond reading writing, arithmetic, and civics. K-12 is so terrible for everything else colleges throw almost all of it out and start from scratch anyways. It's one of the only places where normal people can access experts in most fields without already having connections.

Not saying there aren't glaring problems with higher ed but this kind of change doesn't seem like it has any chance of helping the situation. I don't love much of anything about undergrad and that it feels like what high school should have been all along but I don't wanna throw the baby out with it. Because then people aren't even getting a proper HS education anymore.

Experts? Maybe for some fields but I didn’t feel like I was talking to experts in my CS classes. They were knowledgeable but most of what they knew was horribly dated based on what the actual business world was using/looking for.

It’s a common refrain that you learn more in the first year of working than you did in all your schooling. For myself I feel like I learned more K-12 and on my own than I did in college (which is why I dropped out my Junior year).

US college sports is ridiculous.

Basically every year hundreds of thousands of poorer kids stake their future on sports, mere hundreds get through to college level where they're just as illiterate and keep training to get into major leagues instead of learning (less than 10% do), and "normal" students pay for it all.

Outcome: hundreds of thousands of illiterate kids who didn't get to college level, hundreds of illiterate college graduates, increased college debt for the rest.

Doesnt matter, gives dudes the testosterone tingles seeing people throw ball and run fast

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but how could tax exemption, or a lack thereof, impact coaching salaries? They would be wage deductions, and the coaches salary is taxed as income for the coach anyway.

IMO this line of reasoning doesn't make sense, there are no shareholders getting profits, all taxation would do is convince the schools not to retain any yearly profits. They would just spend all of their revenue to avoid the taxation.

Property taxes, for one.

they could just have the university own the property and the sports team would rent it from the university and avoid the property tax like that

> they could just have the university own the property and the sports team would rent it from the university and avoid the property tax like that

You don't let them do that. If it were that trivial, all real estate would be owned by non-profits.

Hmm I’m not sure about that. How would the non profits get enough capital to own all the real estate? Universities are a counter example because they are well capitalized.

> How would the non profits get enough capital to own all the real estate?

Borrow it?

If leasing back property from a non-profit were all it took, I'd "donate" my house to a non-profit in exchange for a lease at a rate lower than the property tax. The moment you sketch that out, however, you notice the holes that add back more taxes, e.g. the below-market lease now being taxed as income.

Churches too.

And the ministerial housing allowance exemption[^0], too, which is quite a racket. In this section of the U.S. tax code, ministers may receive part of their salary as a housing allowance which is not subject to income taxes. Moreover, if there is a mortgage on their home, they can still claim the full mortgage interest deduction even though at least part of it is offset by tax-free payments from the church. Double-dipping in other words.

[0]: https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc417

https://archive.md/rOocF

I have no clue why, but there are only so many cars and stairs I can identify before giving up.

Pretty good chance it is this DNS issue, or related to it.

https://gist.github.com/ardislu/b2f2b4b439c5da2f7ccb6bb42e7a...

That's useful. I'll check into that.

Only a robot could have this much patience...!

Especially when the schools themselves start begging for a new taxpayer paid stadium.

root and branch on tax, tends to put you into the loony basket. Not that it isn't a good idea, but a huge number of bizarre ideas lie in "lets reform the tax systems" -and most functional pragmatic politicians limit themselves to promises they think they can win on, instead of ones they know they can't. Uni tax shelter structure is centuries deep at this point. I can think of other low hanging fruit ... churches maybe? ok.. same-same: they have armies of motivatied monomaniacal supporters.

Fans vote.

Obviously, most politicians are insufficiently pragmatic and hitch themselves to any story which will get them airplay time, good or bad.

Churches run on donations and most of them are full on charities that give a ton to local and foreign communities. No way you’re taking tax exempt status from them nor should you try. Universities, and especially their sports teams, on the other hand are outright businesses

Universities invest a ton into underprivileged children. Their sports systems are the only way for many poverty-stricken people to make it. You shouldn't stop that from happening. Hillsong, as an example on the other hand, is an outright business with millions of dollars in revenue.

> most of them are full on charities

Which would still be fully tax-deductible. The portion going to staffing should not be a charitable deduction. They should pay property tax on their performance halls like secular ones do.

You’re free to set up a tax free secular literary, scientific, or educational organization that functions exactly like a church with a meeting hall, performance venue, lectures discussing mark Twain, classes on bicycle repair, cheese making, model railroading etc…

Here is a list of the purposes for which you can setup a 501(c)(3) organization.

“charitable, religious, educational, scientific, literary, testing for public safety, fostering national or international amateur sports competition, and preventing cruelty to children or animals”

If you remove religious for some reason, churches will just operate as educational or literary organizations, so you’d need to remove those as well.

1. They would have to pay property tax, just as I think cemeteries should. (guess what, I'm also a Georgist).

2. "churches will just operate as" or not, we're taking hypothetical here, it's my fantasy and they don't get to!

Depends on the state. Most states allow some subset of 501(c)(3) organza to forgo property taxes.

So if you’re running things, the Mark Twain society gets to operate tax free, but the Jesus society doesn’t? Sounds dangerous to me.

I can't read the paywalled article, but "college sports" is much bigger than the SEC football example referenced at the beginning of the article; most programs don't throw around that kind of money.

It is probably a wash anyway. The big money that bothers the author (e.g., coaches salary, admin compensation) ends up getting taxed as income. If you taxed it on the way in, you'd probably just see it offset with lower salaries and less tax collected on that spending. I don't see a big tax collection potential here.

According to the same NCAA analysis of Power Five schools, only 15% of expenditures go to student athletic aid at Power Five schools, while 22% goes to “coaching compensation” (and an additional 20% goes to “administrative compensation”)

Would you also agree that if NFL teams were tax exempt, it wouldn't matter anyways?

I agree that the dollar impact of lost taxes on society is negligible, but the blatant unfairness seems worth fixing.

The point of my original comment is that the majority of college sports don't make the kind of money that NFL or SEC teams make.

Amen

Sportsball needs to die.

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