Taxation is a way and form for the government (local, county, State, and Federal) to get its necessary funding so as to take care of those necessary things on behalf of the people that our governance so serves. This would seem to strongly suggest that those organizations so designated as 501(c)(3) charitable establishments should be carefully and periodically reviewed, because any organization, no matter how perceived, that does not pay appropriate taxes to the tax authorities, quite obviously means that more of those taxes must so be paid by those that are the taxpayers, no matter how burdened that these taxpayers actually are, at the present time.
Look, it has to be said, that most people, organizations, and corporations aren’t thrilled about paying their fair share in taxes, but the paying of their fair share is not only their obligation but should be seen as their patriotic duty. This so signifies that those entities that are especially skilled in the not paying of their fair share of taxes, including nonprofit universities, are in their own way, “cheating” the American public that they are an integral part of. When it comes to nonprofit universities, there just doesn’t seem to be a good case for why they so receive such favorable tax treatment by the taxing authorities, of which, it would be one thing if those universities were traditionally run with a very strict budget that first and foremost, did everything possible to provide that higher education to qualified students at the lowest possible price point, but that isn’t typically true, at all. Rather, universities seem to be quite adept at making all sorts of money, in all sorts of ways, through for instance, academic research combined with strategic corporate partnerships which benefits both that corporation as well as the university, but does not even indirectly benefit those taxpayers that are stuck having to pay more than their fair share to subsidize the university.
When we look at property taxes it sure doesn’t seem right, that these nonprofit universities, that implicitly get the benefits of what those property taxes help pay for, don’t contribute any cash to them – especially when we consider the fact that a lot of these universities are situated in very desirable areas, that would normally produce a healthy amount of property taxes for the government, if there were some other entity, that was not so designated as a nonprofit.
Indeed, most universities are filled with highly intelligent and credential people, so we shouldn’t be surprised then, that some of those people make it their point to do whatever that they can so do, that thus sells to the general public all of the benefits that they supposedly get, by virtue of these community-based universities being nonprofit and hence not susceptible to much of the taxation that other companies and people, must pay. The fact that universities don’t bother to pay, in many a case, what needs to be paid for valued municipal services, is a crying shame, made ever worse, by the salient fact that some of these same universities, have endowments in the billions of dollars, but somehow won’t do their good part to pay their fair share of taxes, but instead lean on regular folks to pay it for them.