In America

Matthew Yglesias has long been pounding the absurdity of alumnae continuing to pile ungodly amounts of money on Harvard as it sits on an endowment pile of over $3B while other colleges languish in a struggle for $crillah; the New York Times asks the question today re: why the fuck are we giving tax breaks for wealthy joints like Harvard, while state colleges are begging for money?

Of course, people who went to Harvard love to write checks to Harvard so they can tell everybody they just wrote a check for Harvard. Secondly, this seems pretty much  in line with the free market, pull-yourselves-up-by-the-bootstraps American mentality of insisting the richest among us get the most breaks - every quarter Exxon boasts of record profits is another quarter we give them billions in tax breaks and they pay none in taxes, and for some reason we demand that bilionaires not be insulted by being asked to pay taxes. In America, we like front-runners. I believe it was Patrick Henry who said "Give me liberty or give me death, and my favorite golfer is Tiger Woods."