Posted on 05/29/2024 7:48:24 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Money-laundering is the art of taking money illicitly gained and cleaning it so that it cannot be traced back to its source and is therefore free and clear. In the television show Breaking Bad, Walter White and his co-conspirators purchase cash-based businesses such as the A1A Car Wash to launder their profits from cooking perfectly blue crystal meth.
Crystal meth is illegal and the profits obviously in need of laundering. Sometimes, though, even legally gained money might need to be laundered. What if the government gave you a contract to do one thing, and you wanted to buy something else with the money? Then you would need to obfuscate the origin of the money — i.e., launder it.
At one point in time, elite private universities were probably mostly in the education business. They accepted tuition and fees and provided an education in return. Today, that is not the main business at these schools. Rather, they have become elite at a different endeavor: diverting money intended for one thing to buy what they want. It may not be polite to call it this, but if it is different from money-laundering, it’s not very different.
Let’s take one example: Columbia University. We all love Columbia, that bastion of sanity and ethics. Columbia is a private university. In the 2020–2021 school year, Columbia received 1.1 billion dollars in grant money from the U.S. government. That is almost exactly equal to the $1.1 billion Columbia received from tuition and fees. So, at private schools like Columbia, students pay no more than we do for their education.
Why? Grants are awarded by the government for different purposes. Many of these grants support research in a variety of disciplines that are of interest and importance.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
How much is this overhead? In fact, a majority of the grant money! According to a recent report from the Heritage Foundation, they take 64 cents on every dollar.
Overhead is the university equivalent of the A1A Car Wash from Breaking Bad. The money theoretically goes to equipment and lab supplies and so forth. Some of it does, particularly in the sciences. But most of this money is simply diverted to the university. The money looks as though it is going to pay for actual overhead, and some of it actually does, but the rest is siphoned off. Its origins — you and me — are obscured. It is a money transfer from the middle class to the liberal elite. According to Heritage, Ivy league schools alone took 1.8 billion of your dollars as overhead in 2022 alone.
We’ve got to feed the ever increasing number of parasites and rent seekers who attach themselves to our economy and drain the wealth created by others, doncha know.
Sometimes sarcasm is so dark it blots out the sun. Columbia was, of course, the principal haven and protector of the group of radical Marxists known as the Frankfurt School and it hasn't changed a bit since.
EVERYTHING is money laundering.
7.5 billion for 6 or 7 charging stations.
$320 for a dock for Gaza that won’t float.
$100 billion to Ukraine.
ALL money laundering.
We live in a kleptocracy disguised as a Republic and both parties participate in the theft.
Instead of asking the taxpayers to pay your exorbitant education fees, why not ask the universities for a refund!
BTTT
“Harvard University is a hedge fund that has classrooms.” —Scott Galloway
Add to this the huge funds they get from foreign sources, like China. Those foreifn sources then have have leverage over the University and what it “teaches”. The Universities are supposed to report these foreign “donations”, but many don’t and nothing happens for vilating the law. Great system for the crooks in academia.
btt
1) An end to federal grants to private educational institutions. Period.
2) An Israeli attitude toward terrorist training camps.
Sixty four cents of every dollar to overhead for government contracted research.
When the GOP took over the Congress in 1994 the estimates for welfare had been that the bureaucracy took 72 cents of every welfare dollar.
2x to 4x overhead isn’t bad when applied to a PhD researcher who might get paid 20% to 30% of what he’d get once out in industry. Schools typically provide offices, equipment, lab facilities, practices, some know how and being able to tap faculty advisors who may specialist in the field.
If something useful is being studied, the bigger question is who owns the IP and any financial spinoffs. Any good school demands it all, and any chump school just wants another year of funding and freedom to publish.
The article also describes this.
“Columbia, for example, takes almost 30 cents on the dollar even on research done completely off campus. That is 30 cents on every dollar just for including the name “Columbia.” And even that is not enough for Columbia — the federal government sued Columbia in 2016 for fraudulently charging on-campus overhead (62 cents on the dollar) for off-campus work.”
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