Taxing non-profits......................?

Connecticut, in a pinch these days for cash, is considering ways to tax Yale's ginormous endowment.  Is that, should that be, fair game?  Not sure how you feel about that?  How about taxing family foundations wherein comfortable stipends are paid to family members?  Hmmm.  the Anonymous Banker gives the issue some thought - here.   A few wee excerpts (and one great line);

"Here’s where reasonable people can have different instinctual reactions. It seems to me personally that creating a tax-shelter that simultaneously employs your children and allows them to reap private social status in perpetuity could have some societal downsides. Or at least rubs up against my admittedly naïve notions of what aristocracy and democracy look like. Maybe that’s just my own aesthetic preferences for a “social good.”

"But even if you don’t share my suspicion of aristocracy, at some point these little family charitable foundations might even start to violate Warren Buffett’s maxim that 'One should leave enough money to your kids so they can do anything, but not enough so they can do nothing.'"

And  my favorite line:

" I feel a natural protectiveness toward educational institutions and their endowments. “You can’t touch this,” as the renowned African-American poet Stanley Kirk Burrell (aka MC Hammer) once said, in an entirely different context."