Exactly. Why should incredibly wealthy institutions like Harvard and MIT be untaxed while the working people of Boston and Cambridge are taxed to the limit?
Lets see how progressive they are when it is THEIR money...my guess is not so much.
They are a business and should be taxed as such.
We all know that there’s almost no possibility the proposed taxation would actually do anything about traffic congestion: it would just go to support more government employees’ getting in productive people’s way, or to payoffs to Democrat supporters. I think Harvard and other institutions with large endowments should affirmatively choose to invest in public transportation projects. Wouldn’t it be in their immediate interest to have Boston be a better place to commute?
Support for the proposed tax sounds like, “Just use the government’s monopoly on armed force to take money from those we don’t like,” which is pure leftism.
My thought. Why should they get tax breaks from the state? They obviously have a quota for MA public school students, and they don't usually choose the best ones.
What an utterly moronic idea. Once you start the precedent of taxing wealth you open the door to the looting of the life savings of every person in the country. You are apparently unaware of how the current income tax reached its current rapacious level. It started as a tax on the wealthy. Now it plunders the income of everyone else who is actually productive. Given the unlimited greed and lust of government bureaucrats for other peoples’ money it won’t take long before they lay claim to everything over a certain minimum amount. Only an idiot or a leftist (but I repeat myself) would espouse a wealth tax.
It’s the number one industry in Massachusetts. What else would they tax?
Agreed. It should apply to all endowments though, not just private non-profits as mentioned in the article.
The 1.6% annual tax, which would be levied only on private, nonprofit schools with endowments that exceed $1 billion, would generate nearly $1 billion, including $563 million from Harvard University and $210 million from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.