The New York Times, in its never ending quest to raise taxes, has now issued a news article endorsing the idea that the city and state should start shaking down NYU and Columbia to fuel the ceaseless appetite for government spending.

The Times’ own journalistic staff of 2,600 was apparently insufficient to tackle the task: The Gray Lady produced the article “in collaboration with the Hechinger Report,” which the paper says “is an independent unit at Teachers College, Columbia University.”

Perhaps if there’s any money left at Columbia after the taxes the Times wants to extort, the university’s journalism school could assign a case study on the logic of a newspaper collaborating with Columbia to answer the question of whether Columbia should pay more taxes.

If there’s any money left after that, the Columbia economics department could assess whether the taxes would actually be borne by Columbia itself or just passed along as price increases to tuition-paying parents, to patients in the university’s hospitals, and to federal grantmakers subsidizing student loans and sponsoring research. 

Beyond the comedy lurk some serious points. My friend Richard Tofel had a news-breaking recent column exposing the trend of what he describes as “philanthropic contributions to for-profit newsrooms.”

Such contributions include $4 million from the Ford Foundation, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to subsidize journalism at the Ochs-Sulzberger family-controlled, for-profit New York Times Company. Somehow the Times isn’t calling for tax increases on the Ford Foundation’s $16 billion endowment, which is roughly triple the size of NYU’s and a few billion dollars larger than Columbia’s. 

The proposal to shake down Columbia and NYU is just the latest tax increase in a long history of levies endorsed by the Times. The paper even wants to eliminate the state and local tax deduction that was capped during the Trump administration and that many Democrats and even some Blue-state Republicans want to fully restore.

The one group the newspaper wants to decrease taxes on is manufacturers based in Communist China, where independent labor unions are banned. The Times editorial writers made that plea in a long piece this weekend. “The broad tariffs on Chinese imports first introduced by Mr. Trump and maintained by President Biden, already go too far,” the Times said.

So the newspaper that wants to increase taxes on New York-based universities and on New York State juice and water drinkers, wage earners, and money managers wants to cut them for Chinese Communist factory owners.

The free-traders will point out that the tariffs are passed along to American consumers. I take the point, but how about saving the tax cuts for the Chinese Communists until after the genocide ends there, after there’s full transparency on Covid’s origins, after it stops buying gas to support the terrorist-backing regime in Iran, and after Jimmy Lai and other Hong Kong advocates of freedom, democracy and rule of law are released from jail?

Again, it’s comical. The Times never met a tax it didn’t like, except for the one that applies to the Chinese Communists. Oh — and taxes that apply to the Ochs-Sulzberger family, which has put the newspaper into a trust designed to avoid the estate taxes it wants the non-Sulzberger rich to pay. 

At the corporate level, the Times plays every tax angle it can — buying the money-losing Athletic in part for $47 million in operating loss carryforwards, claiming more than $6 million in “research and experimentation” tax credits as if the Times were some high-tech pharmaceutical or space exploration company rather than a legacy newspaper property.

The whole situation is illuminating. The left favors higher taxes for whomever happens to be unpopular at the moment — Columbia and NYU, cigarette smokers, high earners, hedge fund managers — and lower taxes for its favored few — Chinese Communists, Sulzberger heirs. The pro-growth right wants lower taxes on everyone. The New York Sun was able to figure that all out somehow without collaborating with anyone from Columbia.