This is a great example of how American Taxpayers are duped into giving billions of dollars away to Billionaires. We are suckers.

The article is rather long but informative.

Taxpayers fund the stadiums, antitrust law doesn't apply to broadcast deals, the league enjoys nonprofit status, and Commissioner Roger Goodell makes $30 million a year. It's time to stop the public giveaways to America's richest sports league—and to the feudal lords who own its teams.

Roger Goodell’s windfall has been justified on the grounds that the free market rewards executives whose organizations perform well, and there is no doubt that the NFL performs well as to both product quality—the games are consistently terrific—and the bottom line. But almost nothing about the league’s operations involves the free market. Taxpayers fund most stadium costs; the league itself is tax-exempt; television images made in those publicly funded stadiums are privatized, with all gains kept by the owners; and then the entire organization is walled off behind a moat of antitrust exemptions....State laws and IRS rules generally forbid the use of nonprofit status as a subterfuge for personal enrichment. Yet according to the league’s annual Form 990, in 2011, the most recent year for which numbers are available, the NFL paid a total of almost $60 million to its leading five executives....Goodell should know—his pay, about $30 million in 2011, flows from an organization that does not pay corporate taxes.

(The author) wanted to put questions about the NFL’s finances to Roger Goodell. When I was researching my book The King of Sports, from which this excerpt is drawn, I requested interview time with Goodell, and he agreed. When NFL headquarters learned that my questions would cover tax exemptions and health issues in the league, the interview was promptly canceled. League spokesman Greg Aiello told me it was not in the NFL’s “best interests” to discuss safety or subsidies.

article by Greg Easterbrook http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/10/how-the-nfl-fleeces-taxpayers/309448/

Corporate Welfare is more shameful than welfare for the poor.