Some private gains are created by shifting costs onto others. The Accord prices those costs at the source: carbon, methane, speculation, systemic financial risk, pavement destruction, public-health harms, aquifer depletion, interchange extraction, and labor-market undercutting.
Tax-exempt institutional investment holdings — university endowments, foundations including family-controlled, religious endowments, hospital systems, museums — collectively hold approximately $3T in investment portfolios. Today these portfolios compound tax-free indefinitely with narrow exceptions (Sec 4968 endowment excise on ~30 universities; Sec 4940 private-foundation excise on a narrow base). The aggregate effective rate across the full institutional investment base is below 1%.
The externality framing centers on the concentration-of-capital effect rather than the loophole-and-arbitrage effect (which the parallel tax-exempt-accumulation subpage covers). When investment capital concentrates in tax-exempt institutional form indefinitely, three external costs accrue. Smaller investors face price-discovery and corporate-governance contests dominated by a few large institutional holders. Markets concentrate on the time horizons and risk preferences of the dominant institutional holders, which may diverge from broader social return. And the public revenue base has nothing to draw on as the institutional pool grows — wealth circulates inside the institutional ecosystem rather than flowing through ordinary taxation.
The Institutional Investment Excise prices that externality.
Annual excise on tax-exempt institutions' investment assets above a $5M per-filing-entity deduction. The rate formula is self-calibrating: one-third of lower of (2yr, 5yr) trailing real S&P 500 return, floored at zero. Long-run average ~1.4%, matching the historical Sec 4968 endowment-excise rate.
The institution always keeps two-thirds of real growth. In booms (sustained 8%+ real return), the rate elevates to capture more of the windfall while still leaving the larger share with the institution. In crashes (negative real return), the rate floors at zero — no extraction during contraction.
The 24-month operating-reserve safe harbor protects working capital. Mission-deployed assets — campuses, hospital wards, houses of worship, equipment in current use — are exempt regardless of scale.
The instrument REPLACES four earlier proposed mechanisms (rationale documented in CFG comments at lib/config.ts:272-279): (1) 50-year deemed realization on dynasty trusts and foundations. (2) EPL inclusion of family-foundation assets in founder's wealth. (3) Fixed 1.4% rate on large endowments only. (4) Fixed 1.0% on assets above $1B.
Each was rejected through iteration as either unenforceable, constitutionally fragile, or vulnerable to threshold gaming. The self-calibrating self-floor design solves all three failure modes.
Tax-exempt institutions with investment portfolios above the $5M deduction. Universities (Harvard ~$50B endowment, Yale ~$40B, Princeton ~$35B, Stanford ~$36B, MIT ~$24B). Large private foundations (Gates Foundation, Ford, Rockefeller, Open Society, Walton Family Foundation). Religious endowments above scale. Hospital-system reserves. Museums (Met, Smithsonian, Getty).
The narrow population — perhaps a few hundred institutions across all categories — controls the bulk of the ~$3T tax-exempt investment base. The architecture targets that concentration directly.
Operating reserves are protected by the 24-month operating-expenses safe harbor. Mission-deployed assets — buildings in use, equipment in operation, houses of worship — are exempt regardless of scale. Smaller institutions below the $5M per-entity deduction are entirely outside the rule.
In down-market years, the rate floors at zero. The architecture does not extract during contractions. Long-term, even modestly endowed institutions continue to grow their investment base in real terms; the architecture removes only the tax-free-compounding excess above the long-run average rate.
$35–42B/year in normal markets; zero in crash years.
Counter-cyclical by design. Revenue is zero in crash years, materially higher in boom years, with long-run average around the canonical 1.4% rate. Worked rate examples (CFG.institutionalExcise.rateExamples): - Strong bull (sustained 12% real): rate ~4.0% - Above average (8% real): rate ~2.7% - Historical average (4.2% real): rate ~1.4% - Mild contraction (negative real): rate floors at 0%
The taxable base after deductions and reserves is approximately $2.5–3T (per DNA Chapter 9), implying long-run revenue around the canonical $35–42B band.
See tax ladder · fiscal scoring
- Threshold-fractionation games
- Self-calibrating rate removes the incentive to fractionate across entities. Each entity above $5M pays the same long-run rate; splitting one $10B foundation into ten $1B entities produces the same total excise (subject to the small per-entity deduction).
- Political-target risk
- Earlier proposals targeting only the largest universities or only $1B+ foundations were politically fragile. The broad-base self-calibrating design applies the same rule to every institution above the threshold, removing the targeted-attack vulnerability.
- Constitutional concerns
- The excise is structured as a tax on the institution (a 501(c)(3) entity), not on the founder or beneficiaries. The earlier EPL-inclusion proposal raised constitutional concerns about taxing assets that have no individual beneficial owner; this instrument operates entirely at the entity level.
- Down-market confiscation
- Rate floors at zero. The architecture does not extract during contractions. The earlier fixed-rate proposals could have produced perverse results in down years (a 1.4% rate on a portfolio that lost 30% nominally is meaningfully confiscatory); the self-floor design avoids this.
The self-calibrating self-floor design closes the threshold-gaming and political-target failure modes that defeated earlier proposals.
- Estate Tax Prepayment Plan
- Individual-level companion. The Estate Tax Prepayment Plan prices personal net worth above $10M; institutional excise prices entity holdings above $5M. Same architectural intent.
- Tax-exempt accumulation (loophole framing)
- Companion subpage covering the same instrument from the loophole-closure angle. Together they document the instrument's role in both the externality stack and the wealth-architecture stack.
- Foundation transfers
- Cumulative transfers above the threshold to donor-controlled entities pay parity at estate brackets. Foundation-transfers prices the move-in; institutional excise prices the staying-in.
- Lifetime gifts
- Cumulative-lifetime tracking covers transfers to natural persons; foundation-transfers parity covers donor-controlled-entity transfers; institutional excise covers held assets at any tax-exempt entity.
- Disclosure architecture
- Form 990 (the existing IRS tax-exempt entity filing) provides the contemporaneous disclosure of investment holdings. The excise rides on existing disclosure infrastructure with minimal new compliance burden.
The Institutional Investment Excise is the entity-level companion to the Estate Tax Prepayment Plan. The Estate Tax Prepayment Plan prices individuals' accumulating wealth above $10M; the institutional excise prices entities' accumulating investment portfolios above $5M. Both at substantially the same long-run effective rate, both intended to bring every form of capital onto the public revenue base.
Pricing university endowments and foundation portfolios reduces grant-making capacity, harming downstream recipients (research funding, scholarship support, operating-charity beneficiaries). The architecture trades public revenue for reduced charitable activity — net negative if the activity has high social return.
The institution always keeps two-thirds of real growth, and the rate floors at zero in down markets. Across long horizons, endowments continue to grow in real terms after the excise. The architecture removes only the tax-free-compounding excess; the underlying capital continues to deploy through ordinary investment returns.
The grant-making concern assumes today's pattern (slow deployment, large indefinite holds) is the right pattern. The architecture's effect — by pricing held investment assets — is to encourage shifting from wealth-warehouse-with-pending-grants to wealth-deployed-as-mission-spending. Foundations that move from indefinite-hold to 10-20 year deployment face the smallest excise burden because their investment portfolios are smaller and shorter-duration. The architecture rewards spending mission-side rather than holding endowment-side.
Mission-deployed assets are explicitly exempt, so operating mission spending is unaffected by the excise. Universities continue to operate, hospitals continue to provide care, religious institutions continue to function. The bite is on investment portfolios specifically.