Posted on 05/18/2021 7:42:11 AM PDT by CheshireTheCat
On May 11, 2021, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton unveiled his latest proposal to take a bite out of the education-industrial complex. His Ivory Tower Tax Act would establish 1% tax on the value of the endowments of the wealthiest private universities in America to help fund vocational education and training.
He tweeted, “Our wealthiest universities have amassed billions of dollars, virtually tax-free, all while indoctrinating our youth with un-American ideas. My bill will tax mega-endowments to support training programs to create high paying, working-class jobs...
(Excerpt) Read more at bigleaguepolitics.com ...
I like it.
IMO, all tax free foundations should be taxed on their earnings. Take a bite out of the schools and those like the other lefty groups like the Ford, Rockerfeller, et al political groups hiding behind tax free status.
Not sure how I feel about this.
I do believe that if a kid attending that U defaults on his student loans due to unemployability, then the U needs to be on the hook for at least 60 percent.
You’d reinstall rigor and some market sensibility to the system. You want to run an R&D center, fantastic, it is it’s own entity and NOT part of the U. Separate accounting systems and no access to grant cash.
Oh, and no personally owned patents for government funded IP. That’s the loophole that created Fauchistein, and others of his ilk.
I overall very much like the shot across the bow of elite leftist puppy mills, and in fact, the top universities have simply become hedge funds and political action committees - which happen to have educational institutions attached to them. Schools like Yale and Harvard pay far more in management fees on their endowments to investment managers than they collect in tuition. There’s something fundamentally wrong about that.
Big time! Don’t forget another evil foundation - Gates
Tax the rich? Where have we heard that before?
How about putting the schools on the hook for student debt defaults instead of the taxpayers?
Be careful when goring oxen as your ox might be next.
Taxing non-profits becomes a slippery slope and the next time the “others” are in power, they will come to tax your sacred cows. It seems to me that this type of tax could rapidly expand to taxing churches and other conservative oriented non-profits.
Another reason why I can’t wait to hear the ivy leaguers’ arguments against this— they might need to make this point in order to defend against taxing endowments.
Why didn’t he propose this in 2016-2018?
let those community college programs that Biden wants to give for free set up courses and apprenticeships for
welding
plumbing
electrical
HVAC
construction
etc
That would shutter just about every religious school in the country, the private schools that serve the middle-class not the elite.
It would be a gift to the public teachers unions they couldn’t even dream about.
I don’t see where taxing foundations would affect religious schools.
I like it.
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me too
Vocational training can go and fund itself. This is disgusting.
I am a liberty-loving American. This whole thing hyping up the blue collar worker as a justification for stealing from trusts and foundations is nauseating.
Maybe, but nonprofits are completely out of control and have little to do with civic benefit. Structuring profitable businesses as nonprofits seems to have become an industry and the political system uses them to raise and move money and not pay taxes.
Just about every Jewish, Christian and parochial school has a foundation. The foundations are generally used to pay for the big capital expenses of the schools; gyms, athletic fields, band and computer equipment etc, etc are frequently by their associated foundations. When these schools have fund raisers like bake sales and whatnot, it’s the foundations that are usually the beneficiaries not the schools directly.
If you start taxing the foundations of the private elite schools, then taxing private primary and secondary educational foundations won’t be far behind. As I said, it would be an unbelievable give-away to the teacher’s unions.
In principle though they should not be taxed. They should remain an untouchable contra-force to government policy.
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