61–70 of 96 posts
It is disturbing that the author so lightly morphs a tax exemption into a taxpayer subsidy. As if the natural state of things is for the government to tax everything and whatever it doesn't is being subsidized.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
These schools value variety (or diversity, if you prefer) in their classes. They could fill up entirely with valedictorians from NYC, or with rowers from New England boarding schools, or with some other well-represented population, if they so chose, because every single member of those populations applies to one or more Ivies. Because they get very few applicants from farming communities, the rural South, Indian rese…
It's a little disingenuous to say it's easier though. Sure if you had someone with the same SAT scores, fencing prowess, IB classes, who also spent the summer prior to her senior year interning at the ACLU and was born and raised on Indian reservation in South Dakota she'd have a much easier time getting into Harvard than a wealthy student with a similar record who went to Phillips Exeter. But to put it mildly it wou…
I'm admittedly unfamiliar with Ivy League culture. What does fencing have to do with your application?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In my two scenarios, the money you have at the end is the same for both. How do you figure? Could you elaborate on the baseline assumptions you're making there? Note that the universities getting paid tax money collected from taxpayers don't pay taxes themselves either .
The article counts tax exemptions as "subsidies." The comment I'm replying to calls this "disturbing." Therefore I'm asking what the difference actually is between a tax exemption and a more overt subsidy. For an example, let's say you'd normally pay $1 million in taxes. I could subsidize you by paying you $500,000. Or I could give you a tax exemption worth $500,000. The net result on your finances is the same. So I'…
There's the problematic assumption. As stated in my previous post, the public universities receiving taxpayer funds aren't paying taxes either. So the article compares universities paying no taxes and receiving no taxpayer funds with universities paying no taxes and receiving taxpayer funds. And then they try to skew the comparison by equating "taxes we could get if we took away non-profit status" with "taxes we already take from taxpayers and pay out". The amounts might both be denominated in dollars, but the payer and payee are materially different.
Among other things, consider that people donate and make endowments to public universities as well. (Oddly enough, this never causes those universities to ask for less taxpayer funds.)
For that matter, raiding a non-profit's coffers won't lower everyone else's taxes by the funds raised.
The difference making the comparison somewhat more "disturbing" is an appearance of entitlement: making the comparison implies an entitlement to take those funds, subject only to a decision to take them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article counts tax exemptions as "subsidies." The comment I'm replying to calls this "disturbing." Therefore I'm asking what the difference actually is between a tax exemption and a more overt subsidy. For an example, let's say you'd normally pay $1 million in taxes. I could subsidize you by paying you $500,000. Or I could give you a tax exemption worth $500,000. The net result on your finances is the same. So I'…
> For an example, let's say you'd normally pay $1 million in taxes. There's the problematic assumption. As stated in my previous post, the public universities receiving taxpayer funds aren't paying taxes either. So the article compares universities paying no taxes and receiving no taxpayer funds with universities paying no taxes and receiving taxpayer funds. And then they try to skew the comparison by equating "taxes…
For the rest of your post, you seem to assume I'm holding some position or making some argument about the merits of the situation, which I'm not. I'm just trying to find out what the supposed difference is between a tax exemption and a subsidy. I am in no way attempting to tie such things to Harvard's status being good or bad, or indeed make any sort of political argument at all.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As if the natural state of things is for the government to tax everything and whatever it doesn't is being subsidized. Why shouldn't everyone pay their share? If I'm paying my share and you aren't paying yours, I'm subsidizing your government services.
Not the same thing here. The rich people already pay their share in tax that supports public education that they don't benefit from. The people who go to public education don't pay anything more. Now the author is arguing that the rich people needs to pay more tax because they pay for their own education by going to a private school? That doesn't make sense to me.
Equal sacrifice does not mean an equal amount of money; $1K is much more of a sacrifice for someone with $10K than for someone with $10 million. It does not mean the same percentage of tax; again, 20% of your income is a much larger sacrifice if you make $10K than if you make $10 million.
> The rich people already pay their share ...
I'm not sure we can say that without first defining their share? Maybe they are paying less or more than their share.
> public education that they don't benefit from
I disagree strongly. The wealthy have benefitted much more from public services than everyone else, including from education. Could you imagine a country without education? Without public education who would be their employees? Who would be their customers? Their vendors? Who would provide the endless network of services on which our economy and their wealth is built, from banking to research to roads to the political and legal systems to security to technology ... Even the wealthiest have built only a tiny edifice on a massive foundation built by our predecessors, and are wholly dependant on our contemporaries.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Suppose you were to start "a hedge fund with a university attached to it", in order to use the university's non-profit status to minimize paying taxes. What would that look like? As long as all the funds went towards the chartered goals of the non-profit, it would look like a really good idea for sustainable funding. I don't see any reasonable basis on which the article's comparison makes sense. They compared the t…
"To look at it another way, the private university provides what most people consider a "better" education without receiving any public funds; clearly we need more such institutions if possible." If Harvard were taxed, would it still provide better education? For accounting purposes, what's the difference between the non-profit status and a subsidy on the equivalent service provided by a for-profit company? Because I…
To fewer people, and in particular to fewer non-wealthy people, most likely. That money has to come from somewhere.
> Which is why I see this as a policy question - is it better to have one person with a "better" education at a private school, or use the same money to have two people receive a college education at a public school?
Sure, it's a policy question. That does not automatically make it government business; that policy has already been made by the people who decided to donate their funds to a private university rather than to some other cause. I don't favor the Darth Vader approach to government policymaking ("I am altering the deal; pray I don't alter it any further").
We have a set of tax laws about non-profits. If we're going to poke holes in those laws to collect more money, we should not do so while listening to arguments about where the money would be "better" spent, unless it is to be put into a special untouchable budget for only those purposes. Laws that say "we'll collect these funds for this purpose" fall flat when the budget doesn't work that way; the funds spent are not in any way tied to the funds collected, nor are the two kept connected in future laws.
> I don't dismiss your point regarding past evidence. However, I think that's symptomatic of a different structural failure, where the cult of hiring MBAs running something "like a business" has taken over schools, health care, government and other organizations which should not have the high rate of failures seen in businesses.
"like a business" seems to only get used when convenient, and discarded otherwise. When people talk about wanting to keep extra money in the budget when returning it, they talk about running the government like a business, and saving the funds for future expenses. Yet governments people have no problem spending more money than they have, and either raising taxes to cover the difference or simply going into debt.
> Regarding "looking at the contents of someone else's bank account and wishing it was yours" - that's a wealth tax, and it exists in France, Norway, Spain, and several other countries, so it does make sense to some.
Yes, some other governments have an even more entitled attitude over other people's money. That doesn't make it right. The justifications used for wealth taxes are even more tenuous than those used to justify income taxes.
Might does not make right. And getting half of voters to agree to take money from the other half is tantamount to rustling up a mob to take what they feel entitled to, but with more diffusion of responsibility.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
These schools value variety (or diversity, if you prefer) in their classes. They could fill up entirely with valedictorians from NYC, or with rowers from New England boarding schools, or with some other well-represented population, if they so chose, because every single member of those populations applies to one or more Ivies. Because they get very few applicants from farming communities, the rural South, Indian rese…
It's a little disingenuous to say it's easier though. Sure if you had someone with the same SAT scores, fencing prowess, IB classes, who also spent the summer prior to her senior year interning at the ACLU and was born and raised on Indian reservation in South Dakota she'd have a much easier time getting into Harvard than a wealthy student with a similar record who went to Phillips Exeter. But to put it mildly it wou…
People give these elite colleges and universities a hard time, but I think it is mostly sensational stories with no meat. Do you know how many US schools are need blind and meet full need for all students? 6. [1] I also have no clue where the story about these schools being for rich kids came from. When my wife went to Princeton a few years back it was one of the cheapest options for her! Schools all base need on the…
I'd rather see us start to question the "non-profit" status of lots of hospitals that pay their management some seriously hefty salaries.
http://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20140809/MAGAZINE/30...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For an example, let's say you'd normally pay $1 million in taxes. There's the problematic assumption. As stated in my previous post, the public universities receiving taxpayer funds aren't paying taxes either. So the article compares universities paying no taxes and receiving no taxpayer funds with universities paying no taxes and receiving taxpayer funds. And then they try to skew the comparison by equating "taxes…
It's not an assumption, it's just fact. Normally you pay taxes on this stuff, but if you can register as an exempt non-profit as Harvard has, then you don't. That has the same effect as subsidizing Harvard by the amount they would pay in taxes. For the rest of your post, you seem to assume I'm holding some position or making some argument about the merits of the situation, which I'm not. I'm just trying to find out w…
There's the problematic assumption. As stated in my previous post, the public universities receiving taxpayer funds aren't paying taxes either. So the article compares universities paying no taxes and receiving no taxpayer funds with universities paying no taxes and receiving taxpayer funds.
(And the article also doesn't say anything about how such a policy change to non-profit tax law would tax the charitable foundations attached to existing taxpayer-funded universities as well, probably because that story doesn't play as well as targeting Harvard. Assuming those foundations don't get special-cased, because a law targeting only private universities plays better with voters, too.)
Separate from that, you could make an argument about the total amounts each university spends per student, or their efficiency, but that's not the argument the article makes. Instead, it presents an argument resting on the highly entitled assumption that all the money is there to be spent as decided by those making policy, without questioning or calling attention to that assumption.
That's exactly the kind of argument I'd expect from an outrage-driven medium, but not one I would give any credence to.
You're asking why people find that comparison "disturbing", but ignoring when people tell you that they find it disturbing because it demonstrates a position of entitlement.
The answer is that there's a difference between raising taxes and decreasing expenses, but since the former looks bad (especially when applied to a non-profit) and the latter looks good, the article spins it to look like the latter.
As for the rest of your argument:
> That has the same effect as subsidizing Harvard by the amount they would pay in taxes.
No, it doesn't. With accounting tricks, you might see it the same way on the balance sheet (though even then "lack of outbound payment" should look quite different from "inbound payment"). One might legitimately choose not to spend taxpayer money paying Harvard to educate students, or at the very least spend no more than the amount spent per student at taxpayer-funded institutions. (And we could have a separate argument about whether to spend that money and how much.) But that's not the decision to be made here; that's the decision policymakers might prefer to make, but not the one they have before them. Instead, the decision is whether to take away a university's non-profit status and tax money they earned for themselves to put it to another purpose. Or, in effect, to raise taxes on a particular class of non-profit institutions (from 0% to some non-zero amount).
And once properly framed as a question about taking away a university's non-profit status and thus raising their taxes, one could then ask why such a policy targets universities in particular rather than other non-profit institutions. Perhaps someone thinks money donated to the Red Cross or to cancer research would be better spent on government-provided healthcare? Step one, don't frame it as taking away the non-profit status of a charitable organization, spin it as that organization already generously getting a government tax subsidy that we'd like to decrease.
In both cases, the net result is that you're raising taxes, but making it look like you're decreasing expenses instead.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Harvard gets to have people with no money get degrees from their school for free because of this. As far as I know, enrollment at Harvard and most other elite institutions skews heavily toward wealthy people.
Yes, Harvard disproportionately has many wealthy people compared to the population at large, but it also provides free educations to large numbers of people. Last I checked, the cutoff was around 60k (meaning, if your family makes less than 60k, Harvard will foot the entire bill). The challenge of overcoming this skew towards wealthy students has more to do with education in general and recruitment than the price tag…
And the few who make it fail at much higher rates; from what I recall research points to the fact that colleges are geared toward middle/upper-middle class students, mostly white. The cultural adjustment is huge (remember these are 18 year olds leaving their neighborhoods for the first time) and few adults or peers understand their situation. Also, many have poor support from home, financially and socially; rather than receiving encouragement, they get asked why they are wasting time and money on college.
In effect (and assuming Harvard follows those patterns) Harvard offers aid with the knowledge that few will take it, and without orienting their services to serve the new students. They could do much better. From what I understand, Amherst has gone a long way toward solving these problems.