{"id":196239,"date":"2008-05-14T16:34:00","date_gmt":"2008-05-14T21:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/05\/14\/more-on-college-endowment-abuse\/"},"modified":"2008-05-14T16:34:00","modified_gmt":"2008-05-14T21:34:00","slug":"more-on-college-endowment-abuse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/05\/14\/more-on-college-endowment-abuse\/","title":{"rendered":"More on College Endowment Abuse"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I can&#8217;t believe that I&#8217;m agreeing with a regular contributor to the National Review&#8217;s &#8220;The Corner&#8221;, Jim Manzi, but I do.<\/p>\n<p>The guy is a moron though, in the last &#8216;graph he claims that because Harvard employees (professors) give to Dems, the institution should not be tax exempt.<\/p>\n<p>He is spot on when he calls Harvard a tax exempt &#8220;Hedge Fund&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>But he <a href=\"http:\/\/theamericanscene.com\/2008\/05\/12\/is-harvard-just-a-tax-free-hedge-fund\">runs the numbers<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\"><p>Receipts = $2 billion of operating revenue + $7.3 billion of investment income + $0.6 billion of gifts to the endowment = ~$10 billion.<\/p>\n<p>Operating costs = ~$3 billion.<\/p>\n<p>Profit = $10 billion \u2013 $3 billion = ~$7 billion.<\/p>\n<p>This explains why Harvard\u2019s net assets increased about $7 billion in 2007, from about $35 billion to about $42 billion.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This actually segues nicely into my previous post on executive compensation.  Just how much is too much anyway?<\/p>\n<p>If Harvard never generated another penny in investment, tuition, or gifts, they would be able to continue to operate for 12 years.<\/p>\n<p>Too much is too much, and by making income (and donations) tax deductible, we are subsidizing &#8220;too much&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>I clearly understand how Harvard is the most egregious case of endowment abuse, but once we have determined that there is a problem and that it needs to be fixed, we are, as the joke goes, just haggling over price.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I can&#8217;t believe that I&#8217;m agreeing with a regular contributor to the National Review&#8217;s &#8220;The Corner&#8221;, Jim Manzi, but I do. The guy is a moron though, in the last &#8216;graph he claims that because Harvard employees (professors) give to Dems, the institution should not be tax exempt. He is spot on when he calls &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[968,985,983],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-196239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-regulation","category-taxes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196239"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196239"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196239\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}