Taxing Harvard?
Posted on April 30th, 2008 in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
Boston’s Channel 5 reports that Massachusetts state representatives are weighing a plan that would impose a 2.5% tax on university endowments of $1 billion or more.
Currently, seven Massachusetts universities have endowments over that baseline: Harvard, MIT, Boston University, Boston College, Smith, Tufts, and Wellesley.
The endowment tax is a popular idea among house lawmakers who have already voted to send it in a study proposal to the Department of Revenue.
The plan strikes one as silly on principle. Why punish a non-profit institution for raising, saving and investing its money wisely? It’s like the state saying, well, we can’t manage our money as well as you do, so we’re just going to take yours.
Nonetheless, as long as these universities are growing richer and richer, pols are going to look at the piles of cash they’re sitting on and think about skimming from it.
Unlike her predecessor, Drew Faust is said to have good relations with Boston mayor Menino. (Who is rumored to have passionately disliked Larry Summers.)
But how are her relations with Beacon Hill?
This might be one of those situations where it’d be helpful to have a Corporation member [other than Faust] who actually lived in Massachusetts……
3 Responses
4/30/2008 10:21 pm
why exactly is this a bad idea Richard?
are you aware of the dismal situation of the american economy? why is it unreasonable to tax those institutions who can clearly afford to make contributions to support important public purposes such as universal heatlh care, improvements in infrastructure or in education?
5/1/2024 7:30 am
Absolutely, taxman. A has money. B doesn’t. That’s the only thing that matters. The only reasonable thing to do under those outrageous circumstances is for the government to take the money from A and give it to B. Why do we need universities anyway? It’s all so simple, even my kindergartner knows what’s right.
5/1/2024 2:05 pm
Right, furthermore, Harvard has never done anything for health care or education or any public purposes. And, certainly the state of Massachusetts is much better at managing a budget than Harvard is. What was that about maintenance workers going home at noon after doing no work?