Re:High taxes be damned, the rich keep moving to California
by AnthonyMouse on Tuesday March 12, 2019 @12:31PM
(#19369945)
> I can see the argument that maybe society would be better served by a bunch of independent charities that all take voluntary donations. I'm not sure everybody buys that
I think this is mostly just the argument about what should be considered a charity again. If people are donating money to the Foundation for the Preservation of High Housing Costs, that is almost certainly not better than what the government would have done with it (or, for that matter, than setting the money on fire and doing nothing), but then why should that be considered a charity?
Meanwhile the idea that the Gates Foundation isn't making better use of a dollar than the mean government expenditure is pretty ridiculous.
At that point the argument would have to be that you still need money for government services that wouldn't be provided by charities -- assuming that the roads being in disrepair wouldn't cause anyone to donate money to a road-improving charity (and that having one of those wouldn't, as is the case now, be proscribed by law). But that's only a problem if almost everyone prefers to give more of their money to charity than to give less of it to the government, otherwise there are still many people paying taxes to fund government services. And given the size of government revenues despite the existence of the charitable deduction, that is clearly not the problem.
> or that these are donations that wouldn't otherwise be made if there were no tax deduction.
It still works even if it goes the other way. If you were inclined donate $100K of your income regardless but it wasn't deductible then you'd have lost about a third of that to taxes (or more than half if you also take into account state and local taxes in California), leaving that much less for the charity.
I think this is mostly just the argument about what should be considered a charity again. If people are donating money to the Foundation for the Preservation of High Housing Costs, that is almost certainly not better than what the government would have done with it (or, for that matter, than setting the money on fire and doing nothing), but then why should that be considered a charity?
Meanwhile the idea that the Gates Foundation isn't making better use of a dollar than the mean government expenditure is pretty ridiculous.
At that point the argument would have to be that you still need money for government services that wouldn't be provided by charities -- assuming that the roads being in disrepair wouldn't cause anyone to donate money to a road-improving charity (and that having one of those wouldn't, as is the case now, be proscribed by law). But that's only a problem if almost everyone prefers to give more of their money to charity than to give less of it to the government, otherwise there are still many people paying taxes to fund government services. And given the size of government revenues despite the existence of the charitable deduction, that is clearly not the problem.
> or that these are donations that wouldn't otherwise be made if there were no tax deduction.
It still works even if it goes the other way. If you were inclined donate $100K of your income regardless but it wasn't deductible then you'd have lost about a third of that to taxes (or more than half if you also take into account state and local taxes in California), leaving that much less for the charity.