More than four years, I began noting on this blog that Americans in means-tested everything (not “on welfare” since that is hateful language) were getting into a wide variety of expensive “nonprofit” tourist attractions either for free or at a 90 percent discount. See, for example Why you want to be on SNAP/EBT (2022) for examples sampled near Filthadelphia in which the working-class and middle-class taxpayers got soaked for $25/adult and those on EBT paid either $2 or $0. Practical advice from 2024: How to get free museum admissions for life: sign up for food stamps (SNAP/EBT), noting that the cards don’t expire and, therefore, even one month on EBT can be worth tens of thousands of dollars in the long run. The most recent post in this genre was “Black Creativity” celebrated at the Jewish-founded/Jewish-funded Griffin Museum of Science and Industry (August 2026). Maybe the X algorithm knows of my interest in this topic, but lately I’ve been seeing posts on X where others have noticed the same pricing structure. Here’s one with over 11 million views, regarding an aquarium in Monterey, California that charges $65 per taxpayer (“chump”) for a visit (and is lame compared to the aquarium in Lisbon!).
One question that I hadn’t previously considered is “Why do museums and aquariums do this?” The answer can’t be “Because they care about poor Americans.” They don’t make a serious attempt to market the free admissions program and, in fact, often don’t post “free with EBT” signs near their entrances and ticket booths. A Californian enjoying the EBT lifestyle in Oakland probably won’t travel down to Monterey.
What if the answer is that they want to preserve their own fat salaries, which are propped up by direct government grants, tax exemptions stemming from nonprofit status, and tax deductions for donors stemming from nonprofit status (half of the money “given” by a California donor will actually be given by other taxpayers because of the taxes that the donor avoids and that have to be made up with taxes from others, just as a substantial portion of the $100+ billion that Bill Gates is shipping to Africa via his foundation is actually coming from American peasants). What’s potentially at risk? Based on the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Form 990 from 2025, they’re paying a huge slate of individuals $250,000+ per year. Excerpts (add up all of the numbers in each row for annual comp; note that Julie Packard worked only 28 hours per week to earn nearly half a million dollars in one year):
The Form 990 shows that they got $105 million in “contributions and grants”, all of which are either 100% tax dollars or about 50% tax dollars. They earned $26 million in investment income, which means they skipped on paying significant taxes on capital gains and dividends.
If everyone has to pay $65/adult to get in, eventually someone at the IRS might ask “How is this place different from Disney or SeaWorld?” The Ivy League universities faced the same challenge and got around it in kind of the same way. When the cost was $100,000 pre-Biden dollars for four years and that was considered an outrageous ripoff, the schools said “but we give out financial aid to kids from poor families and they’ll pay $0”. This turned out to be a nearly cost-free promise because they didn’t admit students from poor families who, as predicted by The Son Also Rises: economics history with everyday applications, typically lacked the grades and SAT scores required. As their prices and endowments have rise, of course, the Ivy Leagues have had to keep raising the family income threshold (now about $200,000/year) for a free ride, but the idea is that same. They give up a tiny amount of customer revenue in exchange for preserving an enormous quantity of tax dollars.
Related:
- “Harvard Endowment Soars to $68 Billion After 27 Percent Return” (Crimson): “The returns followed Harvard’s August disclosure of its $2.2 billion stake in SpaceX, which went public in June in the largest initial public offering in history. The position was worth more than all of the endowment’s other reported public holdings combined. … MIT trailed with [a return of] just over 10 percent.”
Seems fairly obvious.
If not many EBT people don’t take advantage of, organizations are not loosing much (and it makes them look generous).
Then, again, they could be doing it to piss you off.
dave: as with open borders, it is not people at my income level who are harmed by this policy. It is working-class and middle-class who will suffer because they can’t afford to take their families in and yet must pay taxes to support those who don’t work, have a similar material standard of living (depends on the state; see Table 4 in https://www.cato.org/white-paper/work-versus-welfare-trade-2013 ), and who can enjoy museums, aquariums, etc. whenever they want.
Harvard analysis: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/trump-clinton-immigration-economy-unemployment-jobs-214216/
I don’t know if anybody is harmed by *this* particular thing. I’m not sure if any EBT recipients take advantage of it.
Dave: taxpayers are harmed. The tax money that the $65/adult aquarium gets (grants and deductions) is tax money that working Americans have to work longer hours to replace. Very few of those taxpayers will earn anywhere near as much as the top employees of the “nonprofit”.
People who aren’t on EBT and who yet don’t have enough money to get their families in are harmed because envy is a negative emotion.
People who do have enough money to get in are harmed if my theory is correct because the aquarium wouldn’t have been able to charge them so much if not for this EBT fake “we help the poor” scam that the aquarium pulls.
The notion that anybody would be particularly envious of this is *intersecting*.
Humans are envious creatures! That’s one reason that I don’t drive a fancier car than I need. I don’t want to show up at Walmart where honest hardworking people are struggling to pay their grocery bills and display a $100,000+ car that those people would envy. You could hypothesize that their life wouldn’t be degraded by seeing me, a total douche, in a car that they’ve always dreamed of, but that ignores everything that we know about humans. (Speaking of expensive cars, our 11-year-old reports that one of his public school peers was picked up in the car line in a Rolls-Royce.)
Let’s look at some original quotes from Claudine Gay on this subject…
“But O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man’s eyes.” (As You Like It)
“O, beware, my lord, of jealousy; It is the green-ey’d monster, which doth mock The meat it feeds on.” (Othello)
“Such men as he be never at heart’s ease Whiles they behold a greater than themselves, And therefore are they very dangerous.” (Julius Caesar)
“No metal can–no, not the hangman’s axe–bear half the keenness of thy sharp envy.” (The Merchant of Venice (who committed genocide))
dave: I said something of the same form, above, to a teenager who asked, “You’re pretty rich. Why don’t you have a BMW or Mercedes?” After my explanation, she responded, “But you have two airplanes and two helicopters.” My response to that was, “They’re in hangars inside an airport fence. The Target cashier who works 10 hours per day on her feet isn’t going to see them and feel worse about her life.”
A working-class American’s envy of someone in the EBT class, though, is sharper than the same person’s envy of a radiologist. The working-class taxpayer knows that the radiologist worked hard in medical school and residency and also has to work reasonably long hours to harvest the income necessary to not care about spend $200 for a couple of hours of family time at the aquarium (tickets plus the inevitable exit through the gift shop). The reason these free-for-EBT-cardholder posts are getting tens of millions of views on X is the same as what prompted interest in the Somalis making $millions off welfare fraud, i.e., that the people enjoying what the working-class American can’t afford to enjoy… don’t work and never worked.
Phil, thanks so much for your honest concern for those who shop at Walmart and their ilk. Your comments are moving me to tears.
Sanctimonious is a formal, disapproving adjective that describes someone who acts as though they are morally superior, more religious, or more virtuous than others, often accompanied by hypocrisy or a “holier-than-thou” attitude
Thanks, Sanctimonious, and I do spend a lot of time thinking about one reasonably regular Walmart shopper: myself!
(My virtue has limits, as you might expect for someone who considers himself less virtuous than average and who spends nearly all of his resources on his own family (which includes me, fortunately!). If a high-cost car prestige-nameplate car actually offered something of substantial value to me, I would spend the $100,000+. I’ve even written lovingly about the Chevy Tahoe, an insane waste of money and natural resources: https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2025/01/21/my-love-that-dare-not-speak-its-name-for-the-chevrolet-tahoes-isolation-from-florida-highway-texture-noise/ But the BMW 5-series that we rented for a week (from Enterprise, at Oshkosh) was a spectacular disappointment and I wouldn’t pay $1 more for it than for a Honda Accord. I guess my rule is that if I can make other people better off without making myself worse off than I will try to do it! Sometimes I stretch this slightly by, e.g., returning shopping carts or carrying trash an extra distance so as not to litter, even I think I won’t be back to the same area for a long time.)
Probably came about as part of a consortium package of social services. Most of these types of places seem headed by left-leaning individuals and the idea was brought up one day in the past and spread throughout the community. If they had to post their numbers on how many people per year actually take advantage of this benefit, it would likely be an embarrassing percentage.
Do the museum verify the EBT cards? I doubt it. It is probably easy to get a fake EBT card.
Roger: I don’t think they have any way to verify an EBT card because they’re not selling EBT-eligible groceries, for example. ChatGPT confirms this. A museum could try, if they wanted to, to see if the physical card was genuine (assuming that they knew what all cards from all 50 states were supposed to look like), but they can’t distinguish between someone who was on EBT for the past 30 years and is current on it vs. someone who was briefly on EBT and still has the genuine card.
ChatGPT says that using a completely fake EBT card to get into a museum for free would be fraud or theft against the museum and could be considered a crime, but ChatGPT, Esq. doesn’t think it would be a standard federal EBT fraud crime. This is purely speculation because “I found no documented prosecution specifically involving a counterfeit EBT card used solely for Museums for All admission.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/28/upshot/theres-just-one-problem-with-photos-on-food-stamp-cards.html says that the cards themselves could have photos on them (Maskachusetts was a pioneer in this area), in which case there might be no need to match a drivers license to the EBT card. SNAP/EBT is a beautiful system, according to the NYT. “Food stamps aren’t awarded to an individual; they go to a household, and anyone in the household is entitled by federal law to use the E.B.T. card the food stamps come on. … Additionally, federal law prohibits retailers from subjecting food stamp shoppers to special scrutiny. So, if a retailer doesn’t ordinarily ask for a photo I.D. to verify credit card transactions, it’s not supposed to scrutinize the photos on E.B.T. cards either.”
It’s a photo ID, in other words, but the retailer can’t do anything if the person using the card looks nothing like the photo.
Phil, it goes without saying that this post is just another of many that is insulting and demeaning to folks with limited means. But, you go further here and impugn those of us Leaders who Direct important institutions like the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
My father, David Packard, who was devoted to Philanthropy, would be appalled at your posts and as a second generation Philanthropist, I too am even more appalled. The small salary that the Aquarium pays me makes me perhaps the most underpaid American in California. I’ll have you know that as someone with a net worth in the billions, I am no idiot. Please move on and find yourself something productive to do with your life!
Apologies to all for my daughter’s hatred of America and her love of socialism and leftism.
https://capitalresearch.org/article/a-reaganite-entrepreneurs-flawed-philanthropy/
Thank you, David. I hope that you remember me from my cubicle that was near your (real) office back in 1982 at HP Labs. If your daughter hates capitalism, she might want to don a keffiyeh and take the family Gulfstream to France tonight. A lot of great stuff happening there.
That’s a fascinating article on the foundation. Looks like the Arabs who call themselves “Palestinian” didn’t get the population control memo. “When the Packard Foundation received $2 billion in 1988 from David Packard, one of its earliest activities was to increase its population control program from $1 million in annual grantmaking to $10 million”
On the Gulfstream now (using Starlink). I want to be able to look back and say I was there helping to kill the Capitalist Police Pigs. Allahu Akbar!
https://x.com/visegrad24/status/2111556620039627225
The smithsonian is free & often quotes a mission to enable everyone to see mankind’s greatest creations, not counting my blog comments. So private museums are 1 degree of freedom from that mission. Still remember when the monterey aquarium was $35, 15 years ago. Was fortunate to have seen it 40 years ago for even less. Don’t think the gold standard was fully abandoned until 2008. Until then, there was some sense the currency should be anchored.
You are totally right, the American nonprofit sector is plagued by agency problems. Why the public tolerates that has always been a mystery to me. See this comparison (ChatGPT):
“London Science Museum: Director’s base salary approximately £200,000 ($265,000) annually.
NYC American Museum of Natural History: President’s base salary approximately $926,000, or $1.5 million including other compensation and benefits.”
Anon, you mention “agency problems” relative to “nonprofits.” Let me suggest that you don’t need to use fancy terminology to understand what is going on. Just have a look at the P&Ls of these “nonprofits.” You will find (as your comment already suggests) that the “profit” all goes to those who work for the “nonprofit.” The word Scam comes to mind. As Hunter Biden likes to say…Comprende?
According to Museums for All, 3.7% of visitors utilized EBT benefits, resulting in a total discount of $256 million. While this figure peaked in 2024, it dropped to a significantly lower level in 2026.
https://museums4all.org/profiles/
That’s useful. Thanks!
“his turned out to be a nearly cost-free promise because they didn’t admit students from poor families who, as predicted by The Son Also Rises: economics history with everyday applications, typically lacked the grades and SAT scores required. As their prices and endowments have rise, of course, the Ivy Leagues have had to keep raising the family income threshold (now about $200,000/year) for a free ride, but the idea is that same. They give up a tiny amount of customer revenue in exchange for preserving an enormous quantity of tax dollars.”
Phil — As for Harvard College, this is what Copilot says:
“About 56% of Harvard College students receive financial aid, according to Harvard’s June 2026 domestic info session slides. Those slides refer to the most recent admitted class, so the figure is for that group rather than every enrolled undergraduate. The same slides say about 45% of students pay no tuition, and about 26% of families pay nothing to attend.
Sources:
Harvard College Domestic Info Session (June 2026)
https://college.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/2026-06/Domestic%20Infosession.pdf”
These numbers are similar at other very selective, very wealthy universities, including MIT.
In Harvard’s case, I am not certain I understand the math. 45 + 26 = 71, which is much higher than 56. But if you just round it down to 50 percent, Harvard (and other very wealthy universities) are deliberately giving up a lot of tuition. If Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc. wanted to, they could charge $250,000 a year tuition for every undergraduate, with no financial aid for any one, and they would have no problem filling up every available slot. There is a lot wrong with the elite universities but in terms of financial aid, all of us should applaud them.
James Mitchell
http://www.jamesmitchell.info
James: Harvard’s endowment grew by $11 billion last year to $68 billion. So they face huge exposure if the IRS were to start taxing them as a hedge fund. They also face exposure from the Trump tax system, as explained by the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/25/opinion/college-cost-education-tuition-ivy-league.html
(colleges can cut what they owe to the feds by reducing the number of tuition-paying students below a threshold)
The only way to tell if Harvard is sincere is to take away all of their tax breaks. If Harvard were paying tax like the hedge fund that it is and still gave huge discounts to lower-income families then we would know that it was a real interest for them and not something that they were doing to cut what they owe to the Federales (and also to the heroic Maskachusetts governor, as described in https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/massachusetts-attorney-general-maura-healey-becomes-1st-lesbian-elected-governor-in-u-s ).
James, if Harvard’s “education” was worth the list price, students would gladly pay it without any discount from “financial aid” using savings and/or getting a loan, just as millions of people do for a home, car or many other things.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1119476380?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback
Is there a way my non-profit concert business in Florida could get large grants if we offer reduced admission to the people on welfare in the Boca Raton community?