Lawyers--the EDSBS stables are filled with them. They eat a lot of hay, but they're definitely worth all the curry brushing and hard work associated with them. You wouldn't believe how much it hurts when they bite you. Their teeth are almost perfectly flat...but they go crazy for sugar.
At any rate, we'd like to open the doors and let the legal and wannabe legal types run around for a bit here, since the government's questioning of the NCAA as a tax-exempt organization won't die. Worse still, George Will's on the case, and he's got (gasp!) numbers:
Tax exemption also is a federal subsidy for ever more lavish facilities: Oklahoma State University, which is receiving $165 million from T. Boone Pickens to improve its athletic facilities, was already planning a $102 million upgrade of its football stadium. OSU charges fans a $2,500 "annual donation" just to become eligible to buy tickets for the best seats. The University of Michigan, which has had 198 consecutive sellouts at its stadium -- it now seats 107,501 -- is spending $226 million to add 3,200 luxury seats and 83 suites. The University of Texas at Austin is spending $150 million to add 10,000 seats to its current 85,123 capacity. These may be sound commercial decisions, but why should this commerce be tax-exempt?
We must mention that George Will is a baseball-loving sissy ninny whose private-school soul wouldn't think of leaving the house without sock garters. He has no qualifications or experience re: writing about college football, and we could totally beat him senseless in a pundit Death Match. (Our Jeet Kun Do is unstoppable. We're guessing Will would collapse into a ball, and think of Princeton.) But that's a very good question the NCAA is doing everything not to answer: what do they do, why isn't it commerce, and why should the commerce the NCAA effectively regulates be exempt from taxation?
George Will: pantywaist dork...with a point.
Lawyers and "internet lawyers," you have the floor. Discuss.
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