Medicaid, social welfare more important than NFL
It seems like every few months the nation’s political climate is on the verge of another apocalypse. Less than two months after the debacle that was the fiscal cliff, we find ourselves on the verge of yet another disaster. At the end of this week, automatic cuts will take place as part of a plan to force Congress to reduce the deficit. And while the deficit is a problem, evidence shows that sequestration might not even reduce the deficit, not to mention the affect it will have on our military and the fragile economy. At this point everyone generally acknowledges that sequestration isn’t good, so the pertinent issue becomes how to effectively reduce the waste in our government to help the national debt.
When the issue of cutting government spending arises, the first targets seem to be the people who actually need the funds. Programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as the Food Stamp Program, Medicaid and other social welfare initiatives are normally among the first brought up as examples of waste. While these programs are obviously not perfect, they shouldn’t be the first targets. The nation’s lower classes felt the brunt of the recession more than anyone else, and the programs they need just to keep afloat should not be the first ones to lose funding. Plenty of examples reveal wasteful spending that goes to groups that demonstrate much less need.
The NFL, by far the most popular sports league in the United States, is classified as a nonprofit organization and, as such, pays no taxes. Officials within the sport actually managed to get this written into law in 1966, and the NHL and PGA both also exploit the loophole. Nearly $91 million is estimated to be lost in tax revenue annually because of this. The NFL holds more than $1 billion in assets and receives almost $200 million from its member teams (some of which do pay taxes), but it is still seen as a nonprofit by the government. This is just one of many examples of revenue lost by the government that could easily take the place of spending cuts on necessary programs. Clearly the NFL is in a much better position to lose its tax-exempt status than a single mother working a minimum wage job is to lose SNAP benefits or Medicaid.
The automatic cuts originally built into the Budget Control Act of 2011 were clearly a bad idea. So far they have failed to provide impetus for an actual deal on how to reduce the deficit, not to mention the fact that sequestration might not help the debt much either. We must change the way we look at the decreasing the debt; closing loopholes like the one the NFL exploits is much less harmful than cutting social programs.