Even less fair than I thought...

I've long been much less than a fan of college sports; the amount of money going into the system is far beyond what's needed for corruption, and there's been no doubt of corruption for many years.

I was pleasantly surprised by the NCAA's final sanctions on Penn State.  I didn't think it was great, but it was a lot more than I expected from them (I thought I'd written about that, but if I did, I can't find it).

But beyond that, there are many examples of schools getting pretty nominal penalties for what seem like fairly major problems (usually recruiting violations).  And there are plenty of examples of athletes getting the book thrown at them for pretty minor violations (usually, very poor kids accepting gifts.  Frequently very small gifts).  And there are whole books to be written about how unfair all that is, no doubt.

But what I just found out about today is how coaches at NCAA schools are given the ability to be very vindictive towards "their" athletes.  The lede:

It’s obvious to anyone who cares enough to look that major college sports are fundamentally unjust. The NCAA rakes in billions of dollars while the players get nothing. Most Division I athletes aren’t even guaranteed a four-year education—tear a ligament or get passed on the depth chart and your scholarship can vanish after a single season. But ask a bunch of coaches, and they’ll tell you that something else is rotten in college athletics. The problem with NCAA sports, they believe, is that the servants aren’t indentured enough.

Yeah, there's a lot of deserved irony in there.

And will the NCAA do anything to improve?  Well, past experience has shown that they need to be dragged, kicking and screaming.  Let's hope things get better.

A Taxing Situation

I've known for a while that, last year, I paid more federal tax on the first gallon of gas I bought than Exxon-Mobile, with its $50B in profits, paid out. (I'm sorry, I'd like to say where I got that conception of the problem from... Maybe a Matt Taibbi-penned Rolling Stone article? If not, he's still a fantastic reporter; one of not many looking to stick it to the powerful. In any event, I can't find it and would be happy to have it pointed out to me.)

This Daily Kos diary discusses one of the strategies by which those taxes are avoided.

This sort of thing leads to a weird situation where I'm not at all sure there's any direct way to monitor. I think it leads to a need to just base taxes on corporate reporting statements, or something along those lines. Frankly, if you're going to do business in America, you should pay taxes in America. It really is as simple as that.

And it looks like it might be nearly impossible to actually trace the money. I don't know. Anyone see the problems with that approach? (Other than that it only works for publicly-traded companies, although I think making it only apply to publicly-traded companies isn't too big a deal. Remember, for those companies, they want profits to look as large as possible, so investors will be more likely to buy. Hence, more tax liability. Simple.)