Tax Lawyer's Blog

“Irony is just honesty with the volume cranked up.”

- George Sanders -

The very same people who have for decades been the beneficiaries of high taxes and unchecked government largesse are now squeaking, squawking and squealing about a new tax that will hit their own wallets.

Luke Ravenstahl, the 29 year old Mayor of Pittsburgh, wants to impose a 1% tuition tax on the city’s students says Pajamas Media’s Tom Blumer :

The mayor’s intended use for the money is, as the Associated Press describes it, “to help pay for pensions of retired city employees.” This is a tax that if used as advertised (I know, that’s a stretch) literally takes money from the mostly young and passes it directly to the old with no kind of meaningful benefit provided in return — hence my “Steal City” nickname.

The mayor’s discussions with the city’s public and private universities have been more like a mob shakedown than an attempt to fairly determine what may be legitimate and heretofore unrecognized extra costs the schools may be imposing on the community. Of course, those costs, if ever identified, have nothing to do with whether retired police and firemen continue to get their monthly pension checks.

The mayor has demanded that the schools cough up $5 million a year voluntarily to avoid having the tax imposed. (In light of the information in the previous paragraph, assuming that nothing is done about costs, how is $5 million even in the neighborhood of being enough?) One university president bluntly stated that she “does not negotiate with an ax hanging over” her head.

Students, whose tution costs will increase anywhere from $27 to $409 a year depending on which college they attend, and faculty members who see the tax as an impairment of their schools’ competitiveness “are not taking it well.”

But, says Blumer, this may be a good thing (emphasis added):

[T]he mayor’s tactics, as well as the tax’s targets, inadvertently reveal the levy’s hidden beauty.

My goodness, students are even engaging in anti-tax and anti-spending protestslike the tea partiers they’ve been taught to despise. What’s more, they’re coming up with constructive, cost-saving ideas of their own.

Perhaps during all of this the kids will meet up with patriotic everyday Americans who will impart important lessons about how free markets and limited government are supposed to work. These are lessons that they more than likely won’t learn or even hear about at their institutions of so-called higher learning. They might also come to understand that what Pittsburgh is attempting is a mere microcosm of what Social Security has been doing to the young people of America for decades.

These would be very good things. Maybe the mayor should threaten such a tax every year.

Be sure to read Blumer’s entire article. It’s near perfection.

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