Editor’s Note: a guest post from Louisiana conservative activist Jensen Young.
As a Christian and a capitalist, I look forward to reading Rep. Dixon McMakin’s bill and I hope the definition of NIL personal income tax exemptions eventually includes all sorts of personal income if not all personal income in Louisiana one way or another.
I come from a family of athletes. My mother will remind you that Title IX meant tennis shoes when she was in women’s sports at Northeast Louisiana University and my brothers ran track and downhill skied in college, respectively. Even if you wish the NIL didn’t happen, we will not be returning to the days of pre-NIL sports anytime soon that my family competed in.
It’s a reality that if an athlete in the future is looking at Louisiana with a 0% income tax and or a 0% NIL rate, we’d have up to a 13.3% advantage on California schools like USC no matter the sport. In the NIL world, it even matters for our smaller colleges as they compete at every level with colleges from neighboring Texas which already pays a zero percent income tax rate and our other neighbors Arkansas and Mississippi who are working on getting rates to 0%.
Personally, seeing the staggering number of empty seats in the Pete Maravich Basketball Arena late last month when the LSU men’s basketball team played a surprisingly somewhat competitive game against then #5 ranked Tennessee also emphasized how important the NIL/sports scene is to the local economy in Baton Rouge.
If a better LSU men’s basketball team was able to sell the extra 5,000 seats and they had sold for an average price of $20 that would have been an extra $100,000 flowing through the economy in just one night. Throw in an extra $10 for those 5,000 folks on average per person on gas, food, and drinks and you get another $50,000 flowing through the economy of one of the college towns. If 1,000 of them had come from Tennessee, drove in and stayed the night to watch their Vols play LSU and spent $150 a night hotel and a nice dinner or breakfast before they left you get at minimum another $150,000 flowing in.
This isn’t just a Baton Rouge issue. I remember from my undergraduate days at Louisiana Tech back when we used to fill up the Thomas Assembly Center in Ruston (seating capacity around 8,000) when the Lady Techsters competed for National Championships & Final Fours yearly. We hosted NCAA 1st and 2nd round basketball games on an almost annual basis back then in Ruston as well.
Like many of you reading this, I recognize that we need a 0% income tax to also be competitive in other ways as we try to attract business to come, grow and develop here in Louisiana. I look forward to a Louisiana where you don’t have to hire the right lobbyist in Baton Rouge to contemplate relocating jobs and meandering through tax code exemptions to expand your business or bring jobs to our state. We have so many natural advantages with our location, waterways, relatively cheap labor force, ingenuity and creativity of our people that we shouldn’t get left behind all the time especially as more companies need to come back or expand manufacturing inside the United States.
I’m writing this from Nevada where a good chunk of my immediate family now resides. Nevada has a 0% income tax and therefore a 0% NIL tax. I look forward to a Louisiana one day when we can do both as well. It may take us a little longer to get there than I’d like (as in, yesterday), but hopefully we can make steps this year and get the 0% income tax done sooner rather than later.