February 1, 2009
Sheboygan Press Interviews Communications Director Bill Ahern on the “Jock Tax”
"State Wants Ex-Football Players to Pay"
By Kate McGinty
"The suspicion was it was because the Bulls won," said William Ahern, spokesman for the Tax Foundation, a Washington-based research group.
Ahern said that, in response, Illinois enacted its own "jock tax"—dubbed "Michael Jordan's revenge."
Soon, most other states followed. Ahern said that today all states go after visiting athletes except those that don't have income taxes: Texas, Tennessee, Washington and Florida, the site of today's Super Bowl XLIII.
"What defined a nonresident worker suddenly changed," Ahern said.
He said that for the states, it was about retaliation.
"Once the Packers are playing in Oakland and Los Angeles and San Diego, why the hell shouldn't you collect from them?" he said.
"Suddenly, it wasn't just people who lived across the border and drove to their jobs, and it wasn't somebody, say, in sales for IBM and was assigned to work for four months in Los Angeles."
