Comment by bretpiatt

But I don't understand why 14%? It should be the same as you, 20%.

Same goes for religious organizations, but it would be extremely hard to enforce, as they might say "government is interfering us practicing our religion", as practicing religions helps to not pay taxes and protected by the Constitution.

if your argument is "but they're not getting screwed equally" then its a completely flawed argument benefiting the government

you should be questioning why you are getting screwed at all. it doesn't solve the government's revenue problems or even make a dent.

People already paid their taxes on all of the principal before they donated it to fund education. You and I are not chartered as an educational endowment; things like Roth IRAs exist for us.

holy shit dog, you make over $533,000???

"funded by my already taxed earnings"

Why did you even try that? Blew your whole argument.

This is genius. Next up, Apple could easily convert into a church with its many disciples.

If they become a church they will have to buy private jets for the faculty.

They don't care about taxes - they are happy to implement regressive taxes that disproportionately burden the middle class and poor, such as sales taxes, Social Security, etc. They just don't want to pay taxes themselves.

It's about punishing their enemies.

> Feels like they’re ghost riding the economy for the lulz

Yes. The abstract of "the economy" doesn't matter. The priorities are "owning the libs" on Twitter and other media, and their own personal bank accounts which can benefit from insider trading the tariffs, state-sponsored memecoins and so on.

Easy, Harvard is essentially a training center for their ideological enemies on top of providing an actual education. They're just putting the boot down and saying stick to teaching instead of implementing and advancing a specific ideology. If taxes are the tools, so be it.

The current admin is openly anti-intellectual.

Edit:

"We need to attack the universities in this country"

"The professors are the enemy"

Specific clip https://www.reddit.com/r/ABoringDystopia/comments/1ichg58/ya...

If you want the full speech it's on YT so if you reply with "context" you should back that up

if you hate universities it makes obvious sense

I’m not half the country, but I can explain it to you. Billionaires already pay tax on investment income. Universities are exempt but now the proposal is that they pay as well, just like individuals (including billionaires) and other profit-making groups.

… or churches

Politics of resentment where elite colleges and universities are unjust scams and billionaires are just the pinnacle of self actualization.

Why do you expect a billionaire to steal from billionaires? a portion of non-essential stealing comes from respct, and of course these billionaires are all a part of the same club.

The other lens is simple as well: big fish don't go after the other big fish. That just ends in two hurt fish and no food. Trump thought he was going after a small fry and underestimated the response. just because Columbia folded doesn't mean all universities will.

lens #3: this clip explains it well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLbWnJGlyMU

He's a bully but if everyone realizes they outnumber (and outmatch him) he loses his power).

Doesn't this tax only apply to "net investment income"/realized gains? Billionaires technically already have to pay it at a higher rate. And well they generally do? I mean when they personally actually sell stock and or receive dividends and interest.

Billionaires do pay income tax on investment income.

Billionaires do not get a tax exemption

[flagged]

>> College endowments are typically tax-exempt, but a 2017 law imposed a 1.4% tax on investment income for a small group of wealthy private universities.

> LoL - why it makes any sense to do this for universities and not billionaires is beyond me, but I'm sure half the country can explain it to me like I'm 5.

Because they already do it for billionaires: unlike university endowments, billionaire investment income is not tax-exempt by default, it's already subject to income tax [1].

[1] At least theoretically, ignoring the loopholes and tax-dodges billionaires can take advantage of with literal armies of accountants.

Billionaires pay 37% or 20% on their investment gains, can't really explain it to a 5 year old because congress and the IRS make it complex.

Stopping those research programs is a choice. They could also choose to pay for them out of the endowment.

I guess Harvard saw the decision at Columbia made the situation worse [1], so they decided to make a different one.

[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/nih-freezes-all-rese...

Some universities should make sacrifices for academic freedom, yes. That's what they are there for!

Much of the endowment is earmarked towards specific ends. It is not a slush fund for discretionary spending.

That’s a very odd perspective.

Could you explain how government research funding constitutes forced speech?

If an individual who receives a government tax credit (say EITC) speaks out contrary to your politics, is the government allowed to withhold that credit too?

1st Amendment is more important than you not liking a specific spending of government funds.

Somehow I doubt you would apply these same principles to someone who doesn't believe in police and objects to their taxes being used to fund them.

I posted this deep in another part of this discussion - but the majority of the money being discussed here isn’t really for Harvard or educating its students - the largest portion are for NIH grants funding to Boston area hospitals, most of which have affiliations with Harvard Medical School.

> The Crimson analyzed the proposed Trump administration funding cuts and estimated that the five hospitals’ multi-year commitment from the NIH is over $6.2 billion and the University’s multi-year federal research funding exceeds $2.7 billion.

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/4/4/funding-review-h...

I’m sure that you have legitimate issues with politics at Harvard, but penalizing a number of independent non-profits that serve the community because they associate with a University that the administration disagrees with also seems to be forcing speech.

Just watch what happens when they exercise their Constiutional right to "say whatever it wants."

Stephen Miller made it clear this morning: "Under this country, under this administration, under President Trump, people who hate America, who threaten our citizens, who rape, who murder, and who support those who rape and murder are going to be ejected from this country."

If the government decides you "hate America" or your business supports some hypothetical rapist/murderer they imagined, you're going to end up ejected from this country without due process.

That's just how government works, buddy. I disagree with my tax dollars being spent to shoot wild horses and fund Lockheed-Martin, but here we are. It's not forced speech, because you have representatives who (in a working system) you could ask to fight against tax dollars being spent on something you dislike. You have a voice, you just don't get to have the only voice.

i disagree with you but i still think you should be allowed to drive on public roads and access publicly-funded health care that are funded by my tax dollars.

Okay, disband all of CBP and then we can talk.

People are reflexive. In a different context, driven by someone else, many of the people currently defending Harvard would instead be pointing out that Harvard and the other elite institutions are part of "the problem". In general this year, it's been interesting to me to see Republicans become protectionists and Democrats become neoliberal free traders, both parties flipping their talking points to either align or disagree with Trump.

The point is, it's eating your seed corn.

Spending a billion of it is not just spending a billion. It's spending the many billions it was meant to provide, in interest, over the next decades.

It's extraordinarily expensive to spend it directly, as opposed to spending the income it generates.

You can certainly do it, in a true emergency. But you certainly don't want to make a habit of it.

To some degree it already has been. After the economic genius Larry Summers paid for the Allston campus expansion with some dodgy loans that blew up in their faces during the 2008-9 financial crisis, there was some attempt to reform the endowment, back off some risky investments, and build up more of a free-cash emergency fund. This actually paid off during the Covid lockdowns, which the university was able to weather without too much disruption.

The other oddity of Harvard's endowment is that each school at the university basically has it's own fund--so that for instance, the Business school and the Law school don't have to worry about money the same way that FAS (the main undergraduate school) does.

Not to mention all those legal covenants have another party to them - they're not written in stone. I'm sure a good number of them would be willing to considering loosening legal restrictions if it would really help.

They made a big fuss a few years ago about what I read imo as over investing in foreign farm land, esp south America and Africa. Which seems to have completely flopped, if not yet realized.

At this point, you really do have to question whether each university hire was merit based or not, including the fund managers.

It's reserved because the donation was earmarked for a specific purpose (eg. a business program or whatever), not because they reserved 30% on tax owing.

>Is the growth 'reserved for a particular purpose'?

It's probably safe to assume donors are competent enough that such glaring loopholes don't exist. After all, the concept of endowments being used as long term savings, rather than spent immediately, isn't exactly a new concept. Failing to take this into account would mean any earmarks are void after a few decades.

He may issue an EO against them similar to the ones he's successfully used to bring major law firms he doesn't like to heel: ban consideration of former Harvard employees (... maybe also graduates?) for Federal jobs, revoke clearances held by anyone employed by Harvard, and ban them from Federal property. Maybe with some other creative terms thrown in to mess with universities in particular.

> he could potentially pull a completely illegal fast one and freeze their accounts

Harvard (and most institutions and powerful individuals) would be smart to maintain liquid assets and a bank account outside America’s control.

I mean, it turns out the fed has the power to pull any money from any account they wish, at any time, like they recently did with NYC.

According to NYT, “ of the $9 billion in federal funding that Harvard receives, with $7 billion going to the university’s 11 affiliated hospitals in Boston and Cambridge, Mass., including Massachusetts General, Boston Children’s Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.”

If I give a school 20 million yearly to research a specific form of cancer, and I find out that they instead used that money to upgrade the plumbing in their dormitories and spent nothing on cancer research, I would not give them 20 million ever again.

Sure, due to funding cuts students will suffer with slowly degrading infrastructure and will need to do plumbing fixes at some point. But that doesn't mean people who give them money for one purpose are happy with it being used for another purpose.

This is absolutely par for the course for university endowments. They're not big pots of money, they're thousands of small pots of money with various restrictions on their investment, disbursement, etc.