sports

David Sirota reports on how we all, fans or not, pay for professional sports: Didn’t Watch the Super Bowl? You Still Got Charged

That term—Sports Tax—is not hyperbolic. In a week that saw Louisiana fork over $5 million to the NFL for the privilege of helping that league make big Super Bowl money, Sports Tax is the most accurate catch-all label for the four sets of levies the public is being made to shell out.

The first Sports Tax comes from the higher taxes we all pay in order to fund direct handouts....In all, Bloomberg Businessweek reports that “taxpayers have committed $18.6 billion since 1992 to subsidies for the NFL’s 32 teams, counting the expense of building stadiums, forgone real estate taxes, land and infrastructure improvements, and interest costs on public bonds.” That's almost $1 billion every year—and that's just for football, meaning the figure isn't even counting similar handouts for other leagues.

The Nation reports on the perversion of college athletics into big business: The Smartest—or Dumbest—Tweet an Athlete Ever Sent

Ohio State’s third-string freshman quarterback, Cardale Jones....tweeted, “Why should we have to go to class if we came here to play FOOTBALL, we ain’t come to play SCHOOL, classes are POINTLESS.”

...

But Jones’s crime wasn’t authoring what the Daily News called a “lame-brained tweet.” It was committing, to paraphrase Michael Kinsley, the greatest sin in sports: he was caught telling the truth.