Tim Walz Keeps Mocking JD Vance’s Yale Education. But Vance Wants To Tax Elite Colleges and Democrats Don’t.

Talk is cheap. If Democrats think the Ivy League is hoarding privileges, do something about it.

Photo by Richard Liu on Unsplash

Minnesota’s Democratic Gov. Tim Walz, now Kamala Harris’s vice presidential running mate, took a shot at his Republican counterpart during his speech at the party’s presidential convention:

So thank you, to all of you here in Chicago, and all of you watching at home tonight. Thank you for your passion. Thank you for your determination. And most of all, thank you for bringing the joy to this fight.

Now I grew up in Butte, Nebraska, a town of 400 people. I had 24 kids in my high school class. And none of them went to Yale.

It wasn’t the first time Walz has tweaked Sen. JD Vance’s (R-Ohio) Yale Law degree.

Some have been quick to note that there’s a bit of friendly fire going on here. There were several Yale graduates who shared the stage with Walz on Wednesday night, including former president Bill Clinton.

While Walz and Harris don’t hold Ivy degrees — increasingly a rarity among Democratic elites — they are undoubtedly the party of those people.

Democrats get the lion’s share of college-educated voters, and Walz himself isn’t quite as folksy and everyman as he presents. He lived and taught in China and has a Master’s degree focused on the Holocaust and genocide studies. Despite the camo hats his campaign is selling, he never won a large share of rural voters when he ran for statewide office in Minnesota. He is, by all accounts, a median Democrat and no matter who wins the presidential race, the party is going to get creamed among rural voters as usual due to the level of polarization we have in this country.

And is it that weird, to borrow Walz’s favorite word, for someone from an elite background to talk about holding elites accountable? Democrats don’t seem to mind billionaire heir JB Pritzker or Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren talking about elites. Matt Bors created this legendary meme for a reason.

But no matter what you think about Walz or Vance’s biographies, the question still remains: do we think it’s a problem that the Ivy League has so much influence over America? Is it an issue that graduates of elite colleges dominate major newspapers like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal?

Hidden among his somewhat cheap attacks on Vance are a good point: why exactly does this small group of colleges get to have such vast influence over our society? Why is it that Walz, with his degrees from public colleges, is such an outlier among high-level Democratic politicians?

One step we could take to reduce the power of the Ivy League and other elite colleges is to tax them.

The GOP-written 2017 tax law implemented the first-ever tax on some college endowments. Taxing endowments — massive pools of money that colleges sit on — can help redistribute some of the wealth that these schools sit on. You could tax endowments to help pay for things job-training for low-income voters. You might also encourage these schools to use their endowments to pay for more tuition assistance for their own students, reducing the need for federal grants and loans.

Not a single Democrat voted for the bill, but that’s to be expected. This provision was tucked into a much larger tax law that included many provisions that were radioactive to Democrats, like cuts for upper-income earners.

Yet the impact of that tax has been pretty modest.

There are, however, some bolder standalone proposals.

Vance himself has introduced a bill to raise the current tax on the net investment income from university endowments from the modest 1.4 percent to a whopping 35 percent. The tax would only apply to colleges and universities with at least $10 billion in assets. It would represent a substantial transfer of wealth from schools like Yale, Harvard, Princeton, etc. to U.S. Treasury and therefore the American people.

Yet when Vance tried to bring the bill up last December, Senate Democrats blocked it.

Talk is cheap. If the Democrats are finally ready to break with the very same colleges and universities that form the intellectual basis for their party, then they can support a proposal similar to Vance’s to start taxing the massive piles of money these schools sit on.

Otherwise, Walz’s jabs are just lightweight politicking.