The Supreme Court is expected to release its decision in American Needle, Inc. v. NFL in the near future after hearing oral arguments on January 13, 2010. In this case, the National Football League is arguing that its teams operate as a single-entity and therefore cannot be held in violation of anti-trust laws. The result of this case is likely to have its impact on other major sports leagues as well. While many of the implications for the NFL have been discussed through coverage of the case, this article suggests specifically how those changes would affect fans of the National Hockey League. [More]

The Chicago Cubs are the highest drawing baseball team in the Arizona Cactus League and earn nearly $52 million for the state of Arizona annually. The team’s current deal with Mesa, Arizona allows the Cubs to buy out of its agreement to play in Mesa after 2012. As a result, the Cubs have received pitches from groups in both Arizona and Florida trying to persuade them to choose their state for the site of their new spring training facility. Initially, an Arizona House committee proposed legislation that would approve a $1 surcharge on auto rentals in the Phoenix area and an 8 percent surcharge on the tickets to all Cactus League games in order to fund the new facility. This raises two significant issues. First, do stadiums actually have these positive results for local economies or do they benefit another party? And second, in light of recent case law, is a tax incentive for the Cubs to stay in Arizona a constitutional option? [More]

States and cities tax professional athletes in multiple ways. A traditional method, which applies to athletes and non-athletes alike, is income taxation by the state in which an individual resides. A second method, utilized by twenty states, is to tax athletes when they participate in games other than in the state they reside. [1] This second method is commonly referred to as the “jock tax.” Since the inception of the jock tax, inequality from state to state has been a prevalent issue. The combination of the jock tax and differences between how states tax its residents may make some cities in the United States and in Canada more attractive than others. At the same time, but for a few adjustments that are made to a team’s salary cap, the teams in the major sports are limited to the same payroll as the other teams in the sport. Given the salary cap, teams in hockey, football, baseball, and basketball may find it difficult to compete with teams with more attractive tax situations. To further increase parity in the major sports, changes should be made to salary caps in the major sports based on the different tax situations created by different states. [More]

In the months preceding elections in the United States it is difficult to avoid statistical sampling, as polling projections are everywhere. Only a sample is used to make these projections because it would take too much time and be too expensive to determine how every voter will vote. [1] Statistical sampling has many others uses as well, including being used as evidence in a trial [2] or being used to estimate how much a taxpayer owes the government on their tax return. [3] As with elections, to determine the exact result for a tax return, every item in the population would need to be investigated. As a population gets larger, this gets more time consuming and more expensive, especially when the information is collected by experts, lawyers, and accountants. Furthermore, each additional item of the population collected will not result in a proportionate change in the precision of the estimate, because the precision of an estimate varies inversely with the square root of the sample size. [4] Tax deductions and credits may be difficult to calculate, but rather than render them worthless to taxpayers or get rid of them completely, statistical sampling should be encouraged when calculations would otherwise be too difficult to calculate. [More]