Felix Salmon wants to reduce the charitable-donation deduction for the super-wealthy:
There are lots of public policy reasons why the federal government should encourage charitable giving — but I can’t think of any good reasons why that encouragement should be targeted especially at higher-income taxpayers. Generalizing wildly, the poor give to churches and the needy; the rich are much more likely to give to museums or concert halls or their own bespoke charitable trusts.
And thereby miss the essential feature of much charitable work, as one of his readers points out:
There is little more rewarding than a direct connection between a donor and those in need. Tax deductions, or even tax credits, creates an incentive for donors to disconnect from those in need and funnel funds through a third party and as we see in the Lauder case, sometimes in those circumstances the donor and the donee are one and the same. Bizarre. Get government out of the charity business and get citizen back into direct donations. We will become a more cohesive country by so doing.
With tax reform, I think the onus on its supporters, like me, is to eliminate exactly those deductions you are most attached to. In my case, that would be charity. And if we are to make any progress on this, we need to start volunteering what we would be prepared to give up in the tax code – for the general welfare, if that is a concept that still flourishes in these times.
The Dish 