Successful Extortion by The City of Pittsburgh

By Scott Baum
December 22nd, 2009

According to today’s Globe, the city of Pittsburgh was successful in its bid to extort money from private institutions, such as universities.  The city recently dropped its threat to impose a completly irrelevant 1% tax on college tuition in order to cover its pension liabilities. Why did the city drop this onerous tax? Because a couple of universities and a nonprofit made sizable donations to cover the city’s pension shortfalls.

I’m not a doctor, but to me this amounts to nothing more than a municipality with serious money management issues strong arming the private sector into bailing it out.