Promoting Health with Sports: When Should Nonprofits Qualify for Tax Benefits?

Abstract

Medical researchers are sounding the alarm that our society's shift to sedentary jobs is triggering an epidemic of chronic diseases, such as type 2 diabetes. This Article brings that modern medical research to a tax debate and hopes to help revolutionize the sports world. This Article's proposal seeks to shift our current excessive emphasis on youth, college, and elite sports to an emphasis on participation by all. Currently, the tax exemption rules vigorously promote youth and college sports but generally deny most-favored tax status to nonprofits promoting nonelite adult sports. These rules are based on doctrines linking sports with education, which developed in a bygone era when sports were for students and the idle rich, and most adults got plenty of physical activity at work. As recently as 1960, approximately fifty percent of all jobs required at least moderate physical activity. By 2006, that figure had plummeted to twenty percent, and the average U.S. male age forty to fifty was thirty-two pounds heavier than his counterpart in 1960. Over this same time span, there has been a dramatic increase in chronic diseases associated with inactivity. Scientists say that greater physical activity and improved diet are the ways to fight this epidemic. This Article makes the case for granting most-favored tax status to organizations that promote nonelite adult athletics and do not charge high fees that would exclude a significant portion of the community.