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Comment by rottencupcakes | Hacker News Reader

What else to expect from the state of Elizabeth Warren.

While I agree that university endowments are getting absurd, I also doubt that the government will make better use of them.

What’s $5B to the Massachusetts government? Almost nothing - just 9% of the budget for one year [1].

These schools should leverage what they’re good at and put real resources to increasing access to education. More OCW courses.

Or just do more research.

[1] Massachusetts enacted its FY 2024 budget in August 2023. The budget reported $56 billion in general fund spending, an increase of less than 1 percent over the previously enacted budget. https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative....)

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It's a 2.5% excise tax on the endowment.

2.5% of $51B is about $1.2B. I'm not sure where your $5B number is coming from.

As to where it goes -- state universities, as the article states. The 2023 budget over all the state universities appears to be around $1.27B, with the state government providing about $320M of that.

An additional $1.2B given to the state universities can probably do a lot of good, and raise the service level (and allow for expansion as well).

You seem to have misread where the funds will be directed.

https://budget.digital.mass.gov/govbudget/fy23/appropriation...

Sweet, want to give 9% of your salary to me?

Exactly. But to look more like a government you should point a gun at him when asking the question.

It’s not salary, $5B would be a one time 10% payment. Just a guess for the max they could extract.

If you want to talk the actual bill, it seems to be for a 2.5% tax on investment returns, so actually pretty small.

You said it was about 9% of the state budget and that was next to nothing.

If 9% is next to nothing then you should have no problems parting with next to nothing of your salary. I know that this would be a one time payment, I'm not asking you to sign up to tithing to me each year.

I'll just get that next to nothing 9% from you the one time and be on my way.

Realize that reflexive responses here constitute aspirations to acquire the resources of others.

It could be that, or it could be that the reflexive response is not to me made to feel like a chump because I am paying taxes whereas a corporation person with $51 billion is not

What’s a “corporation person”? There’s an implication of unfair consumption that defies you on the basis of taxation. Don’t get me wrong, I am fully versed in the tax system and unfairness around it, but it’s not because corporations can pool capital and earn income without personal taxes. Much more so it is on the side of categories of taxation, with various arbitrary and intricate rules about which real people are permitted to do what on what category of income.

I'm sure Harvard's investment arm is incorporated. That gives it some person hood in US law. It's making income on its investments and not paying income tax.

* 9% is a significant amount of money.

* Government doesn't really use the money, they are going to state universities and community colleges, if you bother to actually read the article.

> What else to expect from the state of Elizabeth Warren.

Elizabeth Warren is a senator and thus represents Massachusetts at the federal level. Also, Massachusetts often has Republican governors. In fact, Charlie Baker was so good, his biggest supporters were the Democrats instead of his own party. Go figure.

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