This is the second part of a three-part series on college football’s bowl system, the Bowl Championship Series. You can read the first part here.

Bowl season, college football’s month-long end-of-season extravaganza, generates millions in revenue and often millions in profits for the organizations that run each bowl game. But because many of those bowls are classified as nonprofit charities, they often pay little, if any, taxes on those earnings.

The largest bowls — the five that make up the Bowl Championship Series — dole out huge salaries to their CEOs and send executives on lavish trips. At the same time, several of them have received millions of dollars in tax subsidies from the states that play host to them, and the taxpayer-financed public universities that play in the games often lose money by participating. That has fueled questions about why the bowls are classified as tax-exempt nonprofits and whether they should be in the future.

The Bowl Championship Series was formed in 1998 as a consortium of the 11 Football Bowl Subdivision conferences and the University of Notre Dame. At the end of the season, 10 schools send teams to the five BCS bowls — the Rose, Orange, Fiesta, and Sugar Bowls and the BCS National Championship game. 57 of the 67 schools that make up the six major conferences that receive automatic invites to those games are public universities that depend on taxpayer funds. But many of them lose substantial sums of money from expenses incurred traveling to and participating in BCS games.

In 2011, Virginia Tech’s athletic department lost more than $420,000 from the school’s appearance in the Orange Bowl. Had the Atlantic Coast Conference, of which Virginia Tech is a member, not helped cover its losses, the school would have lost $1.3 million in 2008, $2.2 million in 2009, and $1.6 million in 2011, all years in which it appeared in a BCS bowl. Tech isn’t alone: over a three-year span, universities lost an average of $331,137 in BCS bowls, according to the Arizona Republic. The average loss in non-BCS games in 2011 was $139,604.

The BCS does, in theory, provide money to schools in other ways to help them make up those losses. Athletic conferences that have a participant in a BCS game receive payouts from BCS bowls — the six major conferences will split a total of $145.2 million this year — that is then divided between the schools. But as HBO Real Sports found during an investigation into the bowl system, those payouts often aren’t as lucrative as the bowls claim.

In an interview with HBO, a tax adviser to 23 bowls set up as charities said most bowls “pay out 75 to 80 percent of all revenue to schools.” HBO’s investigation, however, found that reality was much different. Out of 16 nonprofit bowls that provided complete records, none gave 75 to 80 percent of their revenue back to schools. The average percentage payout was in the mid-50s, and the Humanitarian Bowl (which is not affiliated with the BCS) gave less than 30 percent of its revenue to schools.

At the same time, multiple bowls take taxpayer-financed subsidies from state and local governments, including the Sugar Bowl, which tonight will host this year’s edition of the BCS National Championship. The Sugar Bowl has taken $11 million in subsidies from Louisiana since the BCS began, including $1.4 million in 2009, even as the state cut spending on many public programs to fill a budget gap. Such deals faced scrutiny from local lawmakers and residents and have since stopped. Tempe, Arizona, meanwhile, will pay the Fiesta Bowl $6.45 million through 2013 to host a smaller bowl game, the Insight Bowl.

The BCS and its advocates counter that bowl games provide economic boons for the cities that host them. An Arizona State University study found that Tempe saw a $355 million economic boost from hosting the Insight Bowl, Fiesta Bowl, and BCS National Championship in 2011. Still, the arrangement begs the question: at a time when states are cutting spending to vital programs, including funding for state universities, are taxpayers getting a fair shake from bowls that utilize tax-funded universities and, at times, public subsidies to earn millions in profits that are often tax free?

Across the board, the GOP’s 2012 presidential candidates have denounced the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, enacted to prevent a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis. However, none of them has come up with a plan to replace it, save one: former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, who is hanging his campaign on a strong showing tomorrow in the New Hampshire primary.

In a Fox News op-ed, Huntsman explicitly said that he would like to “break up the big banks” by imposing a fee on banks whose size hits a certain percentage of GDP:

As president, I will break up the big banks, end future taxpayer bailouts, and restore capitalist principles – competition and creative destruction – to our financial sector.

We will accomplish this by imposing a fee on banks whose size exceeds a certain percentage of GDP, proving them an incentive to slim down and localize.

This is akin to the “bank tax” that lived a short life during the financial reform debate. While it wouldn’t be as clean a break as reimposing the strict divide between investment banking and traditional commercial banking, if it were large enough, a fee like the one Huntsman proposed would provide an incentive for banks to shrink — or if not, could be used to build up a pot of money that could be tapped to dismantle a big bank that is going under, instead of resorting to ad hoc, taxpayer funded bailouts.

As Reuters’ Felix Salmon put it, Huntsman “goes where Obama dares not tread.” Indeed, Obama has never called for breaking up the biggest banks — or “right sizing” them, as Huntsman puts it — preferring instead to craft a regulatory framework in which big banks can exist without having one of their failures doom the wider economy.

But that fact is that the biggest banks are still big enough to pull down the financial system, and while Dodd-Frank went a long way to make it possible to dismantle those banks without taxpayer funds, it didn’t do much to reduce the dangerous co-mingling of investment and commercial banking (which even 90s deregulator Newt Gingrich now admits it was “a mistake” to permit in the first place).

Despite an unexpected budget surplus for this fiscal year, Michigan may drastically underfund its School Aid Fund, which is the primary source of dollars for K-12 school districts that educate nearly 1.7 million students.

Last year, the School Aid Fund ran a surplus (much like the overall budget for this year). However, GOP Gov. Rick Snyder siphoned off the School Aid Fund’s money “to plug a shortfall in the state’s General Fund.” To assuage infuriated educators, he agreed to a one-time payment of $200 per student, $100 of which was only received if the district adopted “financial best practices” — including school employees paying at least 10 percent of their health insurance premiums.

But now Republicans say that one-time payment is up, and K-12 schools will not have enough money to make up for the loss come next year. Why? As the Kalamazoo Gazette reports, while Republicans were gutting the School Aid Fund, they also passed a $1.6 billion tax cut for businesses that is costing schools $700 million per year, or $500 per student:

New revenues will offset about $1.3 billion of the $1.6 billion business tax cut, said David Zin, an economist for the Senate Fiscal Agency.

But almost all revenues are going into the state’s General Fund rather than the School Aid Fund, which is losing more than $700 million a year from the business tax cut.

In short, while the General Fund gets new revenues to replace money lost from the tax cut, the School Aid Fund does not.

Thus, the School Aid Fund will see its lowest revenues since 1994, according to the state Senate Fiscal Agency. Kalamazoo Public Schools superintendent Michael Rice said that the decrease in funding means “school districts have seen their revenues eroded by about one-sixth since 2005, when taking inflation into account.” “It’s not simply that the School Aid Fund is at its lowest level,” he added. “It’s also that $1 given to us today buys one-sixth less that it did five years ago.”

Of course, prioritizing the wealthy over working Michiganders is nothing new for Snyder and his colleagues. While enacting $1.7 billion in tax cuts for corporations last year, Snyder also “shaved billions of dollars off future health care and retirement commitments,” ended the state’s Earned Income Tax Credit, enacted a regressive increase in personal taxes, and cut aid for 11,000 families and nearly 30,000 children.

Surveying this field of foregone responsibility, Mattawan Public School Superintendent Patrick Bird said Republicans “[have] given a huge tax break to corporations, but where are they taking those dollars from?”

America’s favorite famous person Kim Kardashian is famous for just getting famous. But as she ascends to the ranks of the 1 percent, its her millions that are now getting all the attention.

The Courage Campaign, an online progressive organizing network, is asking this Kardashian to support a millionaires tax in California this year, in order to pay her fair share. As the Courage campaign points out, Kardashian made about $11.9 million more than a middle-class Californian in 2011 while paying only 1 percent more in taxes. Watch the campaign video:

As ThinkProgress Economy editor Pat Garofalo notes, 2009 saw over 1,000 households pay no federal income tax on their income of a million or more thanks to tax loopholes and shelters. Indeed, “tax rates for millionaires have fallen by 25 percent since the mid-’90s, while one quarter of millionaires currently pay lower tax rates than the average middle-class household.”

The Courage Campaign points out that if Kardashian pays a little more, she’ll help “fund education and critical services.” After all, in what is painfully obvious to her reality show’s millions of viewers, “not everyone is born a Kardashian.”

This is the first post in a three-part series about the college football’s bowl system, the Bowl Championship Series.

When Louisiana State University and the University of Alabama meet in tonight’s Bowl Championship Series (BCS) National Championship game in New Orleans, college football’s top prize will be on the line. More than 75,000 will be in attendance, and millions will watch on TV. The Sugar Bowl, host to this year’s game, stands to make millions of dollars in profits. And little, if any, of it will be subject to federal taxes.

That’s because the Sugar Bowl and the championship game, like the three other bowls that make up the BCS, are classified as tax-exempt nonprofit charities, set up with missions to do public good with the money they earn and spend. In 2007, the last time New Orleans hosted both the Sugar Bowl and the BCS title game, the games generated $34.1 million in revenue — $11.6 million of that was tax-free profit.

The BCS, a consortium of the 11 Football Bowl Subdivision conferences and the University of Notre Dame, has been in place since 1998 and manages the five biggest bowl games — the Rose, Orange, Fiesta, and Sugar Bowls, and the BCS National Championship Game. The revenue generated by the BCS games and other nonprofit bowls — $261 million in 2009 — along with lavish trips for executives, large compensation packages for their CEOs, and scandals involving potentially illegal political donations have raised questions about why the bowls are classified as nonprofit charities and whether they should continue to be in the future.

The reason bowl profits aren’t taxed “is because it’s supposed to be serving a public purpose,” Gary Roberts, dean of the Indiana University School of Law-Indianapolis, told the Arizona Republic. The bowls, Roberts said, are not supposed to “squander this money that is not taxed.”

And yet, since the BCS began, average pay for the CEOs who run each bowl has more than doubled and now exceeds $500,000 a year, the Republic found. The Sugar Bowl, which has cash reserves in excess of $34 million and until recently benefited from tax subsidies from the Louisiana government, pays its CEO more than $593,000. In 2007, when the Sugar Bowl also hosted the BCS championship, it paid its CEO more than $645,000. Average executive pay at BCS bowls ranks in the top 2 percent of pay among nonprofits with similar budgets, and in the top 9 percent among nonprofits with budgets twice their size, the Republic found.

“If you’re running these bowls, it’s an opportunity to do good, not to do well,” Dean Zerbe, who investigated charitable exemptions while on the staff of Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), told HBO Real Sports. “You can pay yourself a reasonable salary…and after that it has to go to a charitable purpose.”

Charitable purpose, however, likely doesn’t include lavish trips for executives and guests, another area that has drawn criticism. Executives at the Fiesta Bowl spent more than $100,000 on a corporate golf trip, and former CEO John Junker spent more than $1,200 at a strip club, according to an investigation into the Fiesta Bowl after a scandal enveloped the bowl in 2009. The bowl spent $3.3 million on The Fiesta Frolic, an annual trip for sponsors, executives, and others involved in the game, since the start of the BCS. In the same time frame, the Orange Bowl hosted a similar trip, The Summer Splash, at an average annual cost of more than $111,000.

The bowls, in some ways, have come to resemble America’s corporate structure: huge profits, high executive pay, and little, if any, taxes paid to the government. At the same time, the bowls depend on the participation of taxpayer-financed public institutions and, at times, taxpayer subsidies. As Sharon Schneider, a director at a Connecticut-based company that runs nonprofit foundations, told the Republic, “(The bowls) are saving millions, and the states and federal governments are losing millions with these four bowls on tax revenue they would collect if they were not nonprofits.”

2012 GOP presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney, who has a large lead in the polls heading into the New Hampshire primary tomorrow, has been taking heat from both Democrats and his Republican challengers for his time at Bain Capital, the private equity firm that he headed. Bain’s modus operandi was to invest in companies, leverage them up with debt, and then sell them off for scrap, allowing Bain’s investors to walk away with huge profits while the companies in which Bain invested wound up in bankruptcy, laying off workers and reneging on benefits.

Last week, Reuters profiled one company, Worldwide Grinding Systems, that went belly up after Bain invested in it. The company not only lost 750 jobs, but the federal government had to come in to bail out its pension fund, while Bain walked away with millions in profits.

And according to an analysis by the Wall Street Journal, this was far from an isolated incident. In fact, 22 percent of the companies in which Bain invested wound up either in bankruptcy or shutting their doors entirely, while Bain itself has made billions of dollars for its investors:

The Wall Street Journal, aiming for a comprehensive assessment, examined 77 businesses Bain invested in while Mr. Romney led the firm from its 1984 start until early 1999, to see how they fared during Bain’s involvement and shortly afterward.

Among the findings: 22% either filed for bankruptcy reorganization or closed their doors by the end of the eighth year after Bain first invested, sometimes with substantial job losses. An additional 8% ran into so much trouble that all of the money Bain invested was lost. [...]

The Journal analysis shows that in total, Bain produced about $2.5 billion in gains for its investors in the 77 deals, on about $1.1 billion invested. Overall, Bain recorded roughly 50% to 80% annual gains in this period, which experts said was among the best track records for buyout firms in that era.

Adding insult to injury, Bain would hide its profits in tax havens, not even paying the rate it was supposed to on the profits it made laying off workers.

Romney has tried to spin his firm’s record of destruction as simply the way “free enterprise” works, claiming that Bain, overall, created 100,000 jobs. However, the campaign recently admitted that the 100,000 statistic is bogus, cherry-picked from a few successful ventures. One of Romney’s former partners at Bain has even said, “I never thought of what I do for a living as job creation…The primary goal of private equity is to create wealth for your investors.”