Yale University has fancy dining halls. They pay no property tax.
Local restaurants struggle to compete, but their tax burden makes that hard.
“We basically pay one-third of our rent in taxes!” complains Matt West, manager of Koon Thai Restaurant. “Yale is a money-making machine.”
It is. Many colleges are.
Yale has a $31 billion endowment. Harvard’s is $40 billion. My alma mater, Princeton, has $26 billion.
Yet, these schools also get government handouts and tax breaks. How government rips off taxpayers and students by subsidizing colleges is the subject of my video this week.
Yale owns about a quarter of the town of New Haven, Connecticut, but the school pays little property tax. It even has a golf course that’s half tax-exempt.
Politicians tried to tax the school, but they cannot.
“It’s written into the constitution,” complains New Haven Board of Alders President Tyisha Walker-Myers. “They just don’t have to pay.”