A group of House members introduced legislation intended to keep taxpayers from footing the bill for expensive professional sports stadiums.
The No Tax Subsidies for Stadiums Act of 2022, introduced February 22, would eliminate the tax-exempt status of municipal bonds that are used to finance professional sports stadiums, according to a release from Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., one of the bill’s sponsors. The other sponsors are Ways and Means Committee members Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., and Donald S. Beyer Jr., D-Va.
In the last 22 years, subsidies for financing professional sports stadiums have cost taxpayers $4.3 billion even though National Football League clubs and other professional sports team owners bring in billions of dollars in profits each year, according to the release, which also blasted the NFL for failing to address sexual misconduct, racial and gender discrimination, and domestic violence.
“The NFL has proven once again that it can’t play by the rules,” Speier said in a statement. “As such, taxpayers-subsidized municipal bonds should no longer be a reward for the Washington Commanders and other teams that continue to operate workplaces that are dens of sexual harassment and sexual abuse. There is no reason why these teams — the average of which went up in value to $3.48 billion in 2021, according to Forbes — should have American taxpayers footing any of their bills.”
“The NFL and these other sports leagues are a money-making machine that are rich enough to build their own facilities, and we don’t need to divert much-needed public funding to these projects,” Blumenauer said.
“Super-rich sports team owners like Dan Snyder do not need federal support to build their stadiums, and taxpayers should not be forced to fund them,” Beyer said. “In a time when there is a debate over whether the country can ‘afford’ investments in health care, child care, education, or fighting climate change, it is ridiculous to even contemplate such a radical misuse of publicly subsidized bonds.”
This isn’t the first time that Congress or other policymakers have questioned tax policies favoring the NFL and other sports leagues.
In 2017 President Trump, angry that some players were kneeling during the national anthem to protest social injustice, asked why the NFL was “getting massive tax breaks while at the same time disrespecting our Anthem, Flag and Country?”
“Change tax law!” Trump tweeted, although it wasn’t clear what tax benefits he was referring to, considering the NFL voluntarily gave up its tax-exempt status in 2015 under pressure from Congress.
The latest version of the Properly Reducing Overexemptions for Sports (PRO Sports) Act (H.R. 363), introduced in 2021 by Rep. W. Gregory Steube, R-Fla., would prevent major professional sports leagues from qualifying for exempt status. The bill’s supporters have questioned why organizations that bring in millions in revenue and resemble for-profit businesses deserve exemption.