Saturday, September 28, 2013

Poor Bowdoin, endowments, and taxes….

Little more than a week ago, we posted on the subject of Bowdoin’s endowment growth and their non-profit status, which we have opined on a number of times in the past.

Shortly thereafter, a loyal reader, or more correctly, a field correspondent, passed along a link to a related article.  Ever curious, he found it on Bloomberg.  The title is “Princeton Drug Royalties Spark Suit Over Tax Exemption,” and the link is this.

You will find it interesting, and we trust that Bowdoin administration does as well.  When you read it, you’ll see just how far so-called ‘non-profit’ institutions stretch the limits of ‘serving the public good.’

Here’s a sample passage:

Princeton “welcomes the opportunity to develop the facts and address the issues,” said Martin Mbugua, a spokesman. It seeks “to serve the public good through programs of teaching and research, and the purpose of tax exemption is to allow the university to devote its resources to this mission,” he said. “We have every confidence that the court will uphold our tax exemption.”

As we’ve suggested before, if we didn’t have to pay taxes, we’d be able to devote far more resources to our mission of spending our discretionary dollars locally, thereby serving ‘the public good.’

In the reading, you’ll also begin to understand just how much income google is deriving from all of us.  The numbers are staggering, in case you wondered.  Which only makes us all the more reluctant to sign up for or join any service google provides, though we’re pretty well convinced they’re making money off us whether we know about it or not. 

Don’t look now, but blogspot, on which this journal publishes, belongs to google!  It’s gotten to where you can’t do ANYTHING on the internet without paying cash tribute to them, and providing them personal data of one form or another.

They even make money off the tin foil sold to make those hats to protect us from them.  And we wouldn’t be surprised if they have a stake in the MLF proposed by Amtrak.

And a joint venture arrangement with those crazy kids over at Train Riders Northeast.

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