CARR: Tax poisons Ivy Leagues
GOP aims at endowments
Here’s how you know that there’s at least one beautiful new provision in the Republicans’ tax bill: Harvard is screaming bloody murder, ditto Yale, Wellesley, Smith and all the rest of the pamperedpuke rich-kid private colleges.
The GOP must be doing something right!
In the tax-reform legislation passed by the House Thursday, colleges that have an endowment of more than $250,000 per student would have to pay an annual tax on the profits from their endowments.
This tax would be a whopping 1.4 percent.
Harvard has an endowment of more than $36 billion. They actually lost money last year, pre-Trump, but let’s say that in a more typical (non-Obama) year, their endowment makes at least a billion, which is probably low. Under the new tax, on that theoretical billion-dollar profit, Harvard would owe Uncle Sam a whopping $14 million.
Ya think Harvard could afford $14 million?
After all, their trust-funded professors and legacies are always loftily lecturing the rest of us about how we must pay our “fair share.” It’s an “investment in the future.” And this would be their favorite kind of tax, one that’s imposed solely on the “one percenters” and their “unearned income.”
Not to mention, it’s “for the children.”
How many times do the swells quote Oliver Wendell Holmes that “taxes are the price we pay for civilization.”
The price pay, apparently, not
Hilariously, the same eggheads who are always denouncing the Republicans as the party of “the rich” are now sounding like ... Republicans, defending their vast billion-dollar tax breaks.
Here’s the statement from the shocked, shocked president of Harvard, Drew Faust: “A tax on university endowments is really a tax on the people who make up these institutions and the work they do: donors, alumni, staff, students and faculty.”
Does that sound familiar? In 2011, Mitt Romney told a moonbat heckler in Iowa: “Corporations are people, my friend.”
Mitt was roundly denounced by the Drew Fausts of the world as a deplorable irredeemable bitterclinging evil Republican plutocrat. Only a tool would say corporations are people, right?
But now, faced with the prospect of that confiscatory 1.4 percent tax, Drew Faust, the CEO of the Harvard Corporation, informs us that Mitt was in fact correct — corporations are people.
Rep. Michael Capuano (DSomerville) is another pablumpuking Ivy League (Dartmouth) SJW defending his alma mater: “These schools use endowments to build buildings, which employ our workers.”
Did you ever hear such supplyside nonsense? Next he’ll be telling us that the money will “trickle down” to the middle class. Capuano is spouting “voodoo economics,” to coin a phrase.
To Harvard and Dartmouth and the rest of the Beautiful People, I would make the same observation their hero Obama once did: “At some point you’ve made enough money.”
As for the Poison Ivy League’s alleged contributions to society, to quote Obama again: “You didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
Of course, the tax would only be imposed on the 60 to 100 richest, most arrogant universities in the land. But Sen. Ed Markey frets that it would establish a “dangerous precedent” and soon every college would be paying the tax on their endowments’ profits.
Funny, that exact same argument can be made about the proposed “millionaire’s tax” on the state ballot next year — that months after the greed-crazed hacks impose a graduated income tax, every taxpayer in Massachusetts will soon be paying 9 percent.
This 1.4 percent tax must be a great idea, judging by the totally unhinged reactions of The Boston Globe’s trust-funded readers this week.
“Many of us are tired of rural America, especially Southern rural America, calling the shots.”
“It is obscene ... the anti-science, anti-fact, anti-intellectual stance of the GOP is shameful.”
“The attack of the Know-Nothing party on progressives and accomplished and educated people in blue states reminds of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.”
Imagine if the Republicans had proposed a 2 percent tax on the Poison Ivy League. The snowflakes would be describing it as genocide of the pointyheaded intellectuals who can’t park a bicycle straight, to quote a Democrat named George C. Wallace.
But my favorite comment on the
Globe message board came from somebody who brought up what the Harvards et al. love to describe as their “mission”:
“If a 1.4 (percent) tax impacts ‘the mission’ ... the 35 percent or so taken off the top of my salary sure as heck impacts my mission.”
I guarantee you that the guy who wrote that went to a public school. Nobody who went to Harvard could ever figure out something that obvious.