Warning - Political Post

I didn't have enough space in my recently published Letter to the Editor to completely vent about Mayor Luke Ravenstahl's idiotic tuition tax, so I figured what better format to finish my rant than in "Pissed Off In Pittsburgh"?

I can actually sympathize with the Mayor, for as Brian O'Neill has so accurately summarized in a recent column, Pittsburgh has a big problem. Its traditional industrial tax base has eroded and its economy is now based on institutions that can't be effectively taxed - universities, health care institutions, and government. And the people who work in these institutions mainly live outside the city. Other cities, particularly those in the South and West, have solved this problem by enlarging the geographic size of the city, thereby increasing and spreading out the tax base. Pittsburgh and Allegheny County should do this, but that would take political will that none of our current leaders has the courage to muster.

As a consequence, the Mayor needs revenue to balance his budget. He could have raised taxes in the city, either by hiking the income tax or the property tax. That would have pissed off the voters, so no deal. So he attempts an end run around the laws prohibiting taxation of tax exempt organizations by taxing their customers. He was thinking about taxing hospital patients but figured that would generate too much negative publicity and the UPMC is too powerful to take on anyway. So he very cleverly chooses a target with the least ability to fight back - students. Hell, most of them don't even technically reside in the city and they sure as hell don't vote. And here's the ironic part. I think he may have actually gotten away with it if he hadn't been so greedy by making the tax a fixed percentage (1%) of tuition. This really shoots down his premise that the tax is a way of reimbursing the city for services it provides to the universities. With a fixed percentage of tuition being charged, he is implying that the city provides more services to more expensive institutions like CMU as opposed to Pitt, which is clearly not the case. He may have gotten away with a nominal tax like $10 per student. This would have fallen short of his revenue goal of 16 million dollars, but at least it would have been a good start and would not have generated such horrible publicity.

If the mayor really wants to target the universities for services the city renders to them, all he has to do is tally up the charges for these services and send them a bill. I guarantee that the charges won't amount to 16 million dollars. Targeting the students directly for these alleged services is morally repugnant. First of all, most students have no money. In fact most students have mountains of debt. A substantial number of college students are minors. It would make more sense to tax the homeless. I think the average homeless person has more in the way of assets than the average college student, and the city must spend a lot of money chasing the homeless out from under our bridges.

I was shocked when the Post-Gazette came out in favor of the tuition tax and it looks like it will pass in City Council. The argument given by the P-G and the council members voting for the tax is absurd. Their brilliant justification is that no one can come up with a better idea. With logic like that we'd still have slavery and child labor!