Professor Richard Schmalbeck and Professor Jay Soled write in the New York Times that tax deductions are ruining baseball for working-class fans. For example, over the past two decades, the average ticket price for a Chicago Cubs game has increased 265 percent. Schmalbeck and Soled claim that the ability of businesses to write off expensive sports tickets as entertainment expenses are primarily to blame.
In 1986, Congress limited the deductibilty of luxury skybox tickets to the face value of non-luxury seats at the game. However, as the price of non-luxury premium tickets have dramatically increased in price, such as the seats behind home plate at Yankee stadium, corporations are now able to deduct a significant amount of their skybox expense.
The solution, Schmalbeck and Soled write, is that deductions for sporting events should be limited to around $50 per seat.
Posted by Marc Patterson, Managing Associate Editor, Wealth Strategies Journal.
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