Cost of Meal Plans Taxed

I found an article from Magna’s Campus Legal Monthly through Academic Search Complete, one of the libraries online databases, entitled “Cost of Meal Plans Taxed” published by Magna Publications.

Years ago there was a tax exemption on meal plans at universities across the nation. The state commission has waived sales tax for decades. But due to recent renovations of campuses across the nation the commission thought that these new dining halls are  in direct competition with private off campus vendors. As a result the tax exemption was cancelled. The costs of tuition aside, the cancellation of this exemption will add another 7% to the already high prices of the meal plans on campuses across the nation. This was also hard on the universities themselves because a lot of them had to get new point of sale systems at all of their dining halls. As a student, do you feel that this cancellation of the tax exemption is necessary? With this extreme amount of newly found revenue by the government, how do you think spend all of this money? I feel, to some degree, that this new tax on college meal plans is necessary. On the other hand, public universities’, like UK, dining halls are not just open to students. So they could create a system that will tax the people who are not students and exempt the tax for the ones that use the student ID.