Money, Pt. 1

(don't give me that do goody good bull...)

I will likely have more to say on The Mayor’s Student Tax later today — oh, it feels good to be able to blog about stupid city policies again! — especially once the Higher Ed Blah Ba De Blah Consortium folks have weighed in at their news conference. And I’ll also have much to say about the melodramatic over-reaction to it. But the one thing I can not wait to write about, if only because it came the closest to making my head explode over breakfast this morning, is this passage from Rich Lord’s reporting:

Pitt’s statement said the university already pays nearly $4.5 million in real estate, parking and amusement taxes to the city...

Let’s set aside, for now, the University’s so-shameless-and-laughable-it’s-not-just-insulting-but-offensive pride in the real estate taxes they pay — something tells me Panther Nation will not be so quick to tally up and announce the amount of taxes they could pay on some of the most prime and valuable real estate in the city — and focus instead on the equally shameless, yet somehow even more absurd, notion that Pitt pays parking and amusement taxes to the city.

University officials made this silly claim before, and recently. (I’ve spent the past half hour looking for a source, and I can’t seem to find it, so you’re just gonna have to trust me on this one. Especially in light of the fact that...) And they made it, in tandem with university officials from Carnegie Mellon University, more than six years ago already, when then-Mayor Tom Murphy floated the idea of a payroll preparation tax on non-profits to help balance the city’s books.

(You’ll notice, as an aside, that the much-maligned Mayor Murphy tried to go after the big non-profits where he should have: in the great chasms of their institutional pockets, not in the cracks and crevices of their poor students’ wallets, as our not-enough-maligned current Mayor has done. Going after the universities by taxing their students is like going after Wall Street CEOs by taxing their janitors.)

Here, for example, is a passage from an op-ed co-authored by Pitt Chancellor Mark Nordenberg and CMU President Jared Cohon: 

Both Carnegie Mellon and Pitt already are a source of significant local tax payments. To give just three examples, the two universities collectively make direct annual tax payments that include about $1.5 million in parking taxes, $1.3 million in real estate taxes, and $500,000 in amusement taxes.

These men, like the author(s) of Pitt’s statement yesterday, are not that dumb. But they are, apparently, that disingenuous. Because they all know full well that Pitt and CMU do not pay one single cent in parking or amusement taxes. They collect those taxes from the people who do pay them — their students, their staff, their faculty, their campus visitors — and then pass them on to the city. By that accounting, and/or by that illogic, I’ve never paid a restaurant bill in my life; my waiters and waitresses have always paid them for me.

I really ought to thank them.

Or better yet, ask them to head up to Oakland and explain how that works to the presidents and press flacks of our two most distinguished universities.

Update, 6:59pm: The fine folks at my beloved undergrad alma mater, Duquesne University, have been sucked into this foolishness as well. Here's an excerpt from a late afternoon email update:

Duquesne University made tax payments to the city and county totaling $2,012,145 last year. These payments were in the form of real estate, parking, amusement, city employee wage, and local service taxes.

In some ways — and it breaks my heart to say it — this is even worse than the Pitt claims. In addition to the patently beside-the-point parking and amusement tax claims, Duquesne gooses the figure by lumping county taxes in with the city, then gooses it even further by adding the equally beside-the-point city employee wage tax — it's paid by the workers, not the university — and local services taxes.

I'll bet my cashier at Eat'n Park tonight understands the difference between the money I gave her and the money she pays for her own food. When she finishes her shift, perhaps I should send her to The Bluff.