Pittsburgh has concocted yet another fancy way to take money from the masses.
This is Paul Caron (the emphasis is mine):
Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl plans to propose a 1% college-education privilege tax to council today, in a move that’s likely to set off a fight with the city’s schools of higher learning.
College and university representatives met with the mayor on Wednesday and argued against the tax, which would be assessed on a college student’s tuition. It technically would not be a levy on the students or their schools, but rather on the privilege of getting a higher education in Pittsburgh….
George Orwell warned us about this kind of talk.
States and local governments are going broke and they have to find ways to increase revenues. Because direct middle-class tax hikes are political suicide, public officials have to get creative.
And that creativity always expresses itself in an indirect tax on the middle-class (i.e. one that is ostensibly levied against big business, but is ultimately paid by consumers in the way of increased prices for goods) or taxes on so-called privileges.
The first method is cowardly and deceptive, the second merely cowardly.
Related Posts:
- Backdoor Taxes: Obama to Consider Consumption Tax
- Pelosi Likes the VAT: Who Left the Backdoor Open?
- Taxing the Middle-Class Through the Backdoor
2 responses so far ↓
1 Sigh! More Tax Increases // Dec 5, 2009 at 6:57 am
[...] Deceptive Taxation: The Tuition Tax [...]
2 The Tuition Tax: Irony on Campus // Dec 19, 2009 at 10:45 am
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