Wisconsin and North Carolina lawmakers are taxing working-class gamblers to subsidize millionaire college athletes.
Wisconsin lawmakers approved $15 million of taxpayer money for the University of Wisconsin’s athletic costs. North Carolina has begun routing $3 million of its sports-betting tax receipts to UNC-Chapel Hill — the first state identified as using that revenue stream for college sports. Connecticut and Louisiana are following. The bills pay for facilities and overhead, freeing up university money for what the system actually wants to spend it on now: paying the players.
This is not a budget choice made in the abstract. Sports-betting taxes are regressive; the people who buy lottery tickets and place parlays are, by every state revenue study I have read, lower- and middle-income households. The Wisconsin household that puts fifty dollars on the Packers on a Sunday is not the household that signs a Badgers quarterback to a seven-figure Name-Image-Likeness deal. It is the household in Eau Claire and Kenosha and Green Bay that, when it bets, is taxed so a Big Ten athletic department can keep its books balanced while it cuts a check to a 20-year-old. The state subsidy flows upward, in the direction of the market, and the family writes the check.
This is what four states have decided to do about it: not fund the academic mission, not restore the Pell, not close the IDEA gap. Fund the football.
The Taylor Swift song that keeps surfacing in my head is “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” from The Tortured Poets Department — the song where the speaker is “miserable” but “the best at it,” performing nightly while the underlying collapse is happening. That is what the always-on workplace requires of any worker whose performance is the deliverable, and it is what the modern public university has been asked to do, only the performance is football and the audience is a sports-betting-tax stream. The universities are not underfunded. They are being asked to perform funding while the underlying collapse happens. The state of Wisconsin’s fifteen million dollars does not solve that. It subsidizes the performance.
Heather McGhee’s diagnosis of the drained pool applies here. The public university was the pool, and the pool was drained on purpose. State appropriations per student at public universities have been falling for the same four decades. Tuition has gone the other direction, hard. The Pell Grant, when it was created in 1972, covered roughly 80 percent of the cost of attending a four-year public university; today the maximum grant covers roughly 25 to 30 percent of that same bill. The federal government has promised for fifty years to fund 40 percent of special education and has never come closer than about 13 percent — the annual IDEA shortfall now runs to roughly 24 billion dollars, which exceeds the entire Title I appropriation for low-income schools.
Here is the kitchen-table version of the same budget. The Catholic parish school where my parents sent three kids on my father’s single postal salary — St. Stanislaus in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, where the tuition in the early 2000s ran a couple months of his net pay per child per year — closed in the diocesan contraction of the 2010s. The parish-school system that educated the working-class Catholic cohort on the eastern seaboard for a hundred years has shrunk by more than two-thirds since 1965. The families that used to fund the parish school, by which I mean the families like the one I grew up in, are now funding the athletic department instead. By which I mean the families like the one I grew up in are not. They are the source.
I am the demographic that does not lose here. My household does not bet on sports; we bought our Fishtown rowhouse with help from David’s grandmother’s estate; I write columns about the economy instead of working two shifts to keep up with the daycare invoice. The families the regressive sports-betting tax actually hits are the families the column does not usually get to speak for. They are not in my demographic. They are the readers I am writing about, not to. I want to flag — because the math my parents assumed I would inherit was partly the math of being white and middle-class in a generation where those still meant something at a state-school admissions office and a bank loan officer’s desk — that the same working-class families I am describing here were never given that math in the first place.
The optimization frame for this — Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror essay “Always Be Optimizing” is the one I keep reaching for — is that the state is not optimizing the working-class taxpayer. The state is optimizing the athlete, in a market the NCAA itself designed, with money the state itself raised from the people least able to spare it. The taxpayer is not a stakeholder in this transaction. The taxpayer is the source. Anne Helen Petersen, in Can’t Even, named the way millennials were taught to think of themselves as walking college resumes and human capital. The millennial kid is being told to maximize her own human capital by paying $50,000 a year for a credential that, in 1972, the federal government would have paid most of. The state is now subsidizing the actual capital of a college athletic department, with taxpayer money, so the department can pay the athlete whose human capital the market has decided is worth seven figures.
The mechanism the sports business analyst Daniel McIntosh named in the AP’s reporting — schools in early-adopting states will argue they are at a “competitive disadvantage” if their legislatures don’t match — is the part the political class is going to enjoy most. It is a permission slip. Once one state subsidizes its flagship athletic department, every other state’s flagship athletic department has the same ask, and the legislature that says no is the legislature that “lost” its team. The ask is engineered to be politically irreversible. The federal-level version of the same dynamic is already in legislative channels, where the bipartisan college-sports bill Saban has been backing against SEC and Big Ten objections is the next thing the state-level legislators are going to point to. Arms races have a known trajectory. Each round is justified by the last, and the public pays for all of them.
There is another way to do this. Sara Goldrick-Rab has documented what federal financial aid would look like if it were designed for the students who actually use it — older, working, parenting, food-and-housing-insecure — rather than for the residential eighteen-year-old it was designed for in 1972. The doubled-Pell Goldrick-Rab has costed would reach today’s working students at scale and restore the maximum grant to roughly its 1975-76 coverage of the four-year public-university bill — for less than a single year of the athletic-department subsidies these four states have now started. IDEA could be fully funded at the forty percent the federal government promised and never delivered. None of this is speculative. All of it has been costed. None of it requires the kind of political courage the four state legislatures have now demonstrated — for the football team.
The state cannot afford the childcare subsidy, cannot afford the IDEA full-funding, cannot afford to restore state appropriations to public universities to where they were in 1985, cannot afford to expand Medicaid to the working-class adults who would actually benefit. The state cannot afford those things because the state has decided what it can afford. The decision is what is being funded. The decision is what is being starved.
We have not changed our question. The state has changed its answer.
You’re on your own, kid.