Buried deep in the hand grenade of a tax bill proposed by the House of Representatives is a clause that a lot of people have been waiting a long time for:

No tax exempt bonds for professional stadiums. pic.twitter.com/MkALqF8Uyn

— Phil Kerpen (@kerpen) November 2, 2017

To recap briefly for anyone who hasn’t been reading this site: In 1986, Congress tried to rein in the use of federally tax-exempt state and municipal bonds — basically a funding mechanism by which local governments can get lower interest rates by fobbing off some costs onto the federal government — by prohibiting their use for any projects where more than 10% of the use would be by a private entity, and more than 10% of the cost would be paid for with private dollars. The idea was to allow tax-exempt bonds for projects that genuinely needed the help — public parks, say — but preventing cities from just sticking federal taxpayers with part of the bill for private projects that could pay their own way.

To say that this failed would be a massive understatement. Local governments immediately started upping their public contributions to stadium and arena projects to keep the private share under that 10% limit — and where that wasn’t possible, they resorted to shenanigans like accepting private payments but pretending they were public tax money. The result has been $3.7 billion in federal subsidies to sports facilities since 2000, according to a Brookings Institution study; it’s this provision that has meant that Red Sox fans living in Boston helped pay for a share of the New York Yankees‘ new stadium.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich proposed prohibiting sports stadiums from using the tax-exempy bond dodge a decade ago, then President Obama did the same in 2015, then Senators Cory Booker and James Lankford did it earlier this year, and finally President Trump hinted at it (in retaliation for NFL players taking a knee during the national anthem) last month. But only now are we seeing actual legislative language for outlawing tax-exempt stadium bonds in a bill that might actually be passed.

Whether it will, in this form, is anybody’s guess: The House could still strip the stadium language before passing the tax plan, or it could be eliminated in the Senate version of a tax bill; you have to figure that sports league lobbyists are working the phones hard this morning. Even if it does pass, it won’t eliminate sports subsidies by any means — state and local governments will still be welcome to throw their own money at team owners, and they would almost certainly seek out loopholes by, say, trying to use tax-exempt bonds to finance all the parts of a stadium project not used for sports. (An attached food court isn’t really “used for games,” right?) But it would at the very least close a 31-year-old loophole that even the guy who wrote it into law wanted repealed, which would be a start, anyway.

So Donald Trump’s tweet yesterday threatening to eliminate the NFL’s “massive tax breaks” got an immediate response from league commissioner Roger Goodell, who issued a press statement that of course the league believes that “everyone should stand for the national anthem,” and will get right on figuring out how to make players do that without violating collective bargaining laws. The lesson: Sanctions work!

Trump hasn’t yet responded to Goodell’s letter, but one has to figure he’ll probably call off the tax break attack dogs now that they’ve achieved what he unleashed them for. Which would be a shame, as I note in an op-ed today for the Washington Post website, because if the president really wanted to rein in public subsidies for pro sports, there’s plenty he could do:

The use of tax-exempt bonds for sports stadiums is a problem that goes back to a time when Trump was still a USFL owner suing the NFL. The practice, which effectively provides sports franchises with low-interest loans at the expense of the federal treasury, has cost taxpayers an estimated $3.2 billion across all pro sports since the turn of the millennium…

And that stadium tax break — if it was what Trump was getting at (even his own press secretary seemed unclear which public money he was talking about) — is only the tip of the sports-subsidy iceberg. Even at $200 million a year, the public cost of tax-exempt bonds is dwarfed by the flood of cash flowing from state, county and city governments to sports teams.

Please go read it now. There’s a good bit at the end with David Minge in it.

Somewhere, somebody is waking up from a coma and is so desperately confused by this:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Donald Trump on Tuesday called for changes to U.S. tax law affecting the National Football League, fueling a feud with the league and its players over protests that he says disrespect the nation.

Here’s the tweet in question, for the record:

Why is the NFL getting massive tax breaks while at the same time disrespecting our Anthem, Flag and Country? Change tax law!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 10, 2017

So that probably means the tax breaks that come along with tax-exempt stadium bonds, which several other Republicans have proposed rescinding for the NFL if their players keep taking a knee during the national anthem. (A state representative in Missouri has also called for “not investing any more money for stadium funding if the players and billionaire owners are going to disrespect our country and disrespect our state,” which I guess means not paying to renovate the Kansas City Chiefs‘ stadium again?) As is typical with Trump, there are no specifics about what he means, though I suppose I could try tweeting at him to ask if he knows a way to change tax law so that the NFL can’t get tax-exempt bonds but more patriotic sports like, er, hockey can.

Anyway, let’s all enjoy the spectacle of Trump and the GOP rushing to embrace a policy that President Obama proposed two years ago, only to be blocked by a Republican-controlled Congress, because they’re mad at players for not standing on the field during the anthem, defying a tradition that dates all the way back to 2009. I remain extremely skeptical that this will lead to any actual legislation, but the universe is so insane right now, anything is possible.

Oh, Darren!!!

Darren Rovell, ESPN Senior Writer

A group of politicians who are tired of taxpayer money being used to build sports stadiums on Tuesday will introduce a bill in the Senate to prohibit the practice.

Darren, Darren, Darren. You know that’s not what the bill would do. You say it in your very next paragraph: “Cory Booker, D-N.J., and James Lankford, R-Okla., are sponsoring a bill that would prohibit teams from using municipal bonds, whose interest is exempt from federal taxes, to help finance stadium construction.” (Actually only tax-free municipal bonds, but close enough.) So why do you perpetuate the myth that ending the use of tax-exempt bonds for stadiums would stop all sports subsidies, any more than it did when President Obama tried it two years ago?

If you want a good writeup of what the Booker-Lankford bill does and doesn’t mean, hie thee to Vice Sports, where my friend/editor (freditor?) Patrick Hruby lays it all out for you, including:

• The $3.7 billion that the Brookings Institution calculates tax-exempt stadium bonds has cost the federal government since 2000. (Darren has this at $3.2 billion, which is what’s in Booker’s press release, but that’s just the amount of benefits that stadiums have received; $3.7 billion is the amount it’s cost taxpayers because some of the money just ends up in the pockets of bond buyers.)
• This has been proposed before and gone nowhere, and it’s likely to fail again (though bipartisan sponsorship is nice, I guess).
• “Booker and Lankford acknowledge that their bill won’t prevent localities and states from smashing the public piggy bank to pay for sports stadiums; in fact, they all but brag that local governments will be allowed to finance future stadium subsidies with ticket and in-stadium purchase taxes.” This is an apparent reference to a clause that would allow using targeted sales taxes on in-stadium purchases to pay off stadium costs, which Booker and Lankford seem to think they can’t do now — or maybe it would just allow cities to use targeted sales taxes to pay off tax-exempt bonds, which indeed they can’t do now thanks to the “generally applicable taxes” test. Except that if tax-exempt bonds can’t be used for stadiums at all anymore … clearly I need to find and read the actual legislation.

For more on the history of tax-exempt stadium bond ruless and how they became a money pit for federal taxpayers despite being intended to do the exact opposite, see my Vice Sports article from two years back. And while you’re reading up, check out Hruby’s article from last week on the “Death Star” federal tax proposal that would actually shut down stadium subsidies once and for all, if only anybody would seriously consider it.

It’s been public knowledge for decades that the federal government spends billions of dollars subsidizing private sports stadiums through tax-free bonds for no good reason: Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan tried (and failed) to address it in 1986 through the Tax Reform Act and again ten years later, Congress has held hearings about it where myself and others testified, and President Obama has proposed eliminating the tax-exempt bond loophole in his annual budget.

Still, that’s not the same as a major think tank actually itemizing the cost to U.S. taxpayers of allowing tax-exempt bonds to be used for sports facilities: $3.7 billion since 2000, according to a new Brookings Institution study (full PDF here).

All together, the federal government has subsidized newly constructed or majorly renovated professional sports stadiums to the tune of $3.2 billion federal taxpayer dollars since 2000. But because high-income bond holders receive a windfall gain for holding municipal bonds, the resulting loss in total revenue to the federal government is even larger at $3.7 billion.

Those two numbers require a little explanation. When a stadium or arena is built with tax-exempt bonds, the bondholders don’t pay taxes (duh) on the bond payments. That means that they’ll accept a lower interest rate, so stadium builders get to save money on construction financing — about $3.2 billion worth over the past 16 years. But stadium builders can’t precisely enough calibrate interest rates to extract all that savings for themselves, so bondholders end up getting part of the windfall as well — about $500 million since 2000.

That $3.7 billion number is a whopping big figure, but the Brookings report goes on to itemize the cost for every sports facility built in the U.S. since the turn of the millennium:

Somebody at Brookings clearly understands how the media works, because a chart like this is crack for local journalists looking for a good news hook. Already this morning there have been stories in the Denver Post on the Broncos‘ federal subsidy (“shortchanged federal tax collectors by $54 million”), in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on that city’s three new venues (“The Penguins received the second biggest subsidy among National Hockey League teams, topped only by the New York Islanders at $122 million”), and in the San Diego Union-Tribune on the Padres‘ federal subsidy, and that’s just what Google alerted me to when I woke up.

Moreover, the study makes clear, these tax breaks have been provided for no real reason at all: Unlike local-level subsidies, which are dumb but at least if you squint can be seen as keeping the team in town or boosting the local economy a smidge or something, federal stadium subsidies don’t benefit the U.S. as a whole even one iota.

Decades of academic studies consistently find no discernible positive relationship between sports facilities and local economic development, income growth, or job creation. And local benefits aside, there is clearly no economic justification for federal subsidies for sports stadiums. Residents of, say, Wyoming, Maine, or Alaska have nothing to gain from the Washington-area football team’s decision to locate in Virginia, Maryland, or the District of Columbia.

Whether all this attention results in anything being done about the situation is another story: When Moynihan tried to pass a bill in the ’90s to rein in federal stadium subsidies, the New York Times reported that he’d been forced to “retreat under a hail of lobbying fire,” and matters aren’t likely to be much different today. (Obama’s budget plan to do the same thing never got seriously considered in Congress.) I’d like to say that maybe there’s a chance for change if the Democrats retake both houses of Congress in January — after all, their putative leader for the last eight years has declared that this is something that needs reform — but given sports leagues’ lobbying power with both parties, I’m not holding my breath. Still, drops of water turn a mill, right? Maybe one of these decades…