Tuesday, October 4, 2011

It's time to tax big-time moneymaking athlete-exploiting college sports

In a well-wrought story in Chicago Life magazine, Allen R. Sanderson makes an excellent case for imposing a sin tax on the revenues that intercollegiate football and basketball generate for everyone but the players.

"This money," writes Sanderson, "could be set aside to provide funding for the ex-players to return to earn a degree, enter a graduate program, and/or start a small business."

Sanderson puts forth a novel idea for addressing the exploitive system by which everyone in big-time college sports makes big money except the athletes.

The peculiar system presided over by the NCAA was laid out very well by Jesse Fox Mayshark in Exploiting U.: The Issue of Paying College Players Grows Along With Coaches' Rising Salaries, a story later cited as the best sports story in East Tennessee in 2010.

While players are obliged to invest the time appropriate to a full-time job, they are forbidden by NCAA rules even to hold part-time jobs, as other college students do.