And there’s more.
Conservatives are footing the bill for taxes that Planned Parenthood, a nonprofit, doesn’t pay — while liberals are making up revenue lost from the National Rifle Association. I could go on. In short, the exemption-and-deduction regime has grown into a pointless, incoherent agglomeration of nonsensical loopholes, which can allow rich organizations to horde plentiful assets in the midst of poverty.
Readers who’d like to (re)visit UD‘s long-running amazement that Harvard University, sitting on close to 36.4 billion dollars (No, that’s silly. That’s crazy. “[W]hen it comes to these fancy universities the official endowment figures are a drastic understatement of the real wealth of the university. Harvard’s real-estate assets are mind-bogglingly valuable, for example, but not part of the endowment.“), continues to enjoy non-profit benefits, can click on the category harvard: foreign and domestic policy. You’ll find it at the bottom of this post.
July 2nd, 2015 at 3:41PM
I don’t disagree with the article, but I’d hate to be the guy to tell everyone, “Hey, your tax code is totally verkackt. Here’s your tax bill for a zillion dollars.”
On the other hand . . . I heard a legislator back in the 1990s claim that the tax code is a more or less accurate reflection of America’s actual policy preferences. I’m not quite buying it, but I guess there’d be someone who’d say it’s anti-democratic to not permit deductions, exemptions, and what-not for which there’s public support.
July 2nd, 2015 at 7:54PM
At the same time, you can tell plenty of others: “And here’s the reduction in your tax bill, because now we aren’t giving someone else an exemption.”
July 4th, 2015 at 8:08AM
anon, yeah, there’s the flip side.
Ohio’s governor recently signed a tax bill that lowers income tax rates, but raises excise taxes, regressive taxes that disproportionately hurt poor consumers. The same tax bill redistributes revenues from wealthier school districts to poorer school districts. Anyone fool enough to believe there’s a coherent philosophy behind this junk bill?
Government compulsion is a sumbitch. I lean toward transparent and simple single or single-rate taxes, but I suppose there are a ton of arguments against them.
UD is on to something big though. Some enterprising politicians are going to make connections: big institutions, government funding, student loan default and delinquency rates, tax exemption, stories (such as UD’s) of highly irregular campus conduct, etc. Campus insiders, I think, need to be aware their institutions may be vulnerable for political reasons unconnected with their actual teaching or research skills.