The Seattle Times’ affection for not-for-profits is understandable considering it hasn’t been profitable itself for quite some time. But in reading their editorial opposed to reducing the federal tax deduction for charitable donations, I just couldn’t get past this line:
The amount of charity in America is one of the things that distinguishes us from many other nations.
Really? Are they implying that Americans are more charitable than citizens of other nations? Because that’s something that’s easily Googled. And it turns out, according to the Charities Aid Foundation’s 2010 World Giving Index, the US ranks a respectable fifth, tied with Switzerland, and smack in the middle of other top-ten nations like Australia (1), Canada (3), and Sri Lanka (8).
Sixty percent of Americans surveyed reported giving money over the past year, 39 percent reported volunteering their time, and 65 percent reported helping a stranger. And that’s good. But not nearly as good as the 83 percent of Maltese who gave money, the 61 percent of Turkmen who volunteered time, and the 76 percent of Liberians who reported helping a stranger.
Yes, in dollar value, individual Americans give more per capita than anyone else. Yay us! But then, we’re relatively wealthy.
As for the larger point that reducing the tax deduction would dramatically reduce charitable giving, I’m not sure what that says about the inherent charitable nature of Americans, but there’s not a lot of data to back that up. Only about a third of Americans even itemize their tax deductions, and research has consistently shown that virtually no one is significantly motivated to give by tax incentives alone.
Huh. Given the facts, you’d think the libertarians on the Seattle Times editorial board would want to eliminate the deduction entirely, and just get out of the way of the market.
Peter Singer talks about this myth in depth in A Life You Can Save
I would support the elimination of the charity deduction, as long as overall rates were correspondingly reduced so that, in the net, the government didn’t get one additional red cent out of the deal.
@2: net-zero revenue enhancement is not deficit reduction. what % of the military budget are you willing to cut? 25?
I’m amazed that the number of Americans that itemize is as high as a third. I would have guessed that it was closer to 10%, and that’s an optimistic guess.
@3: Absolutely! Can we also cut social security, medicare, and medicaid benefits by 25%?
It doesn’t matter how many PEOPLE are motivated by tax incentives. What matters is how much MONEY gets donated because of tax incentives.
Let’s say that only the ultra-wealthy itemize their deductions, and they personally responsible for 90% of the income for all the NGOs we care deeply about [easy enough to determine]. AND they would never donate a cent if they couldn’t get the tax incentive [a big unknown in this debate].
You could argue that the tax breaks don’t matter to most of us, but many NGOs would flounder without them.
#5: No!
“Yes, in dollar value, individual Americans give more per capita than anyone else. ” Yeah, if you want to measure in silly things like dollars. Silly capitalists and their monetary giving.
(I don’t necessarily agree with the Times, but seriously? Calling them wrong because they’re only measuring the amount of money Americans give in terms of money? What?)
25% sounds like way too small of a military cut. Can we start with 50% and go from there?
@8, I think his point was that the amount of money the average American has to spend is greater than someone in, say, Chile. If the average American makes $10 and gives $1, and the average Chilean makes $1 and gives $0.25, the American has given 4 times the money the Chilean gave, but they’re proportionally less charitable. (See Mark 12:41-44 for a biblical example of this logic.)
And that maybe matters if the cost of running things in the States is higher than it is in Chile. If running a program costs $2,000 in the US but only $250 in Chile, the Chilean has donated (a) a greater part of their income and (b) a more substantial portion of the program’s budget.
That’s the point I think Goldy was making. Whether any of my assumptions are accurate, I couldn’t say, but he’s definitely got a legitimate quibble.
Religion needs to compete with other entertainment outlets. If raves have to pay taxes god should have to pay taxes. Also, I’m starting a church.
Your own links don’t agree with your premise. From your last link:
If you’re suggesting that charitable donations no longer be tax deductible, then I really don’t have anything to say except “fuck you hard”. Or maybe that should be “eat shit and die”. Either way, it means “fuck off, Stranger, I’m out of here”.
Ditto. But it seems most of the world beat us to it, Fnarf.
We opened the joint, now we get to turn off the lights. It’s sad, but the handwriting’s on the wall.
@5: what @7 said. 25% military reduction and end the bush tax cuts, the budget is nigh on balanced. and we don’t penalize the elderly or poor children. we can afford plenty of entitlements if we stop playing OBL’s game.
George Bush increased charitable foreign aid to Africa threefold, but you’ll never hear that mentioned here.
He also quadrupled the number of free health clinics in impoverished American neighborhoods.
Print it sometimes…if you dare.
FAG!
@15, you just mentioned it, and I’ve seen it mentioned many times before. The only trouble is that it’s not true.
The World Giving Index is a concocted crock of Liberal Bullshit that tells nothing. Shove it up your ass , Goldy.
The US is from from the richest nation per capita but gives more per capita by far.
Yay us!
But then, Goldy is relatively stupid…..
Naturally Goldy and the Slog Hipster Underclass see no value to deductions.
Overeducated underemployed service sector unskilled laborers seldom do…..
Selfish Moocher HomoLiberal Humanists really drag down America’s stats on giving.
Goldy, what about an expose on how much more Conservatives donate than Liberals?
Goldy, you left out the best part from the linked article:
“Q. We often hear that religious people give more to charity than secularists. Is this true?
A. “Religious” people (the 33 percent of the population who attend their houses of worship at least once per week) were 25 percentage points more likely to give charitably than “secularists” (the 27 percent who attend less than a few times per year, or have no religion). They were also 23 percentage points more likely to volunteer.four times more dollars per year, on average, than secularists ($2,210 versus $642). They also volunteered more than twice as often (12 times per year, versus 5.8 times).
“The gap is not due to personal differences between religious and secular people with respect to income, age, family, or anything else. For instance, imagine two people who are identical in income, education, age, race, and marital status. The one difference between them is that, while one goes to church every week, the other never does. Knowing this, we can predict that the churchgoer will be 21 percentage points more likely to make a charitable gift of money during the year than the nonchurchgoer, and will also be 26 points more likely to volunteer.”
Why are Humanist such stingy selfish bastards?
The Liberals are always whining about how they care about the poor but when it comes to their own time and resources they are AWOL.
Religious people give of themselves to help others.
Humanists want to tax the “rich” (aka- “anyone but me”) to “help” others.
From the article Goldy linked:
“Q-Who gives the most in America: conservatives or liberals?
A- Self-described “conservatives” in America are more likely to give—and give more money—than self-described “liberals.”
Households headed by a conservative gave, on average, 30 percent more dollars to charity than households headed by a liberal, despite the fact that liberal families in these data earned an average of 6 percent more per year than conservative families.”
cont….
“These differences go beyond money. Take blood donations, for example. In 2002, conservative Americans were more likely to donate blood each year, and did so more often, than liberals. People who said they were “conservative” or “extremely conservative” made up less than one-fifth of the population, but donated more than a quarter of the blood. To put this in perspective, if political liberals gave blood like conservatives do, the blood supply in the United States would surge by nearly half.“
and…..
Q. Aren’t people who favor social spending just as charitable as people who give money to charities?
A. No.
People who believed the government should not take greater measures to reduce income inequality gave, on average, four times as much money to charity each year as those who believed the government should equalize incomes more. This result persists even after correcting for other demographics.
It even holds for all sorts of nonmonetary giving. For example, people who state that they thought the government was “spending too little money on welfare” were less likely than those saying the government is “spending too much money on welfare” to give food or money to a homeless person….
The Maltese? Turks? Liberians?
Really?
@22 Total red herring. Church goers are supporting their own social clubs with their donations. Those donations are not “helping others”, they are buying their dear leader a gold watch and putting silk cushions on their pews. They are helping themselves, and getting a tax break to do it.
@ us (22-25),
Yeah, I was also wondering why Goldy would link to the American Enterprise Institute. I especially love the article “Beyond Obama’s Assault on Free Speech” on their homepage. I suppose it’s good to occasionally browse conservative rags like this but I’d trust their “research” team about as much as I’d trust a scorpion on my back.
@us,
You also forgot to quote this from the AEI article.
“For example, in the year 2000, families earning $20,000 or less gave an average of about $450 to charity, while families earning more than $100,000 gave away an average of a bit more than $3,000.”
So, in other words. People who are broke and can barely feed their family (really, if you’re making under $20K you’re broke) donate a little over 2% while the wealthy donate 3%. Of course since the wealthy are far more likely to itemize they get some of that back so the poor donate at least as large a percentage to charity as the rich do.
Personally, I’d say get rid of ALL deductions EXCEPT the donation deduction. Any deduction that has its own intrinsic benefit (home interest, student loan interest, Child credit, etc) should go. Charity to NGO’s actually saves the government money since they provide some health and human services so it’s in everyone’s benefit that we keep donating to them.
@27
ah yesss….
a common Liberal delusion;
“Q. But aren’t they just giving to religious charities and houses of worship?
A. These enormous differences are not an artifact of religious people giving to their churches.
Religious people are more charitable with secular causes, too.
For example, religious people were 10 percentage points more likely than secularists to give money to explicitly nonreligious charities, and 21 points more likely to volunteer. The value of the average religious household’s gifts to nonreligious charities was 14 percent higher than that of the average secular household, even after correcting for income differences.
Religious people were also far more likely than secularists to give in informal, nonreligious ways. For example, people belonging to religious congregations gave 46 percent more money to family and friends than people who did not belong. Religious people were far more likely to donate blood than secularists, to give food or money to a homeless person, and even to return change mistakenly given them by a cashier.”
.
moral of the story-
Religious folk support their Faith and its good works AND STILL donate more to non-church causes than Humanist Scum……
@y’all:
>implying that religious people and secular humanist people are two disjoint sets
It may interest you that I am religious (moderately so), and believe that our society should be secular and humanistic.
It doesn’t, 31. It doesn’t at all.
Oh yah. GOLDY’S A BIG FAG!
All I know is that a group of volunteers I worked with raised $100,000 in the past year in small contributions to help a sick girl. Americans, in general, are good at giving.
@10 even going with the percentage method, we’re still by Goldy’s numbers #5 worldwide. What else positive are we #5 at? I’d love to be up there for education, happyness quotent, lack of corruption, lack of obesity, lack of carbon emissions, health care, etc. I’ll take #5 for giving.
My next house is going to be a Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster – and, thus, tax-exempt.
Yeah, you’ll be paying my property taxes for me, a savings of $4500 a year.
@31
Distinguishing between “religious” and “humanist” is the phraseology the article linked and we carry it over in out comments to avoid confusion.
Of course we all know, as you point out, that Humanism is a religion.
A Religion that is aggressively attempting to force its doctrines and beliefs on the entire nation.
Our religious liberty,
the freedom to believe as we choose-
the freedom to not have government force us to abide the dictates of any particular religion,
the freedom to have government not take sides in religious debates,
the freedom not to have particular religions change our public institutions to conform to their particular doctrines,
those freedoms are in peril as never before…..
Secular Humanists, please keep your religion out of our laws and institutions.
@35
it’s early…. let’s try again:
Drawing a distinction between “religious” and “humanist” is the phraseology of the article Goldy linked and we carry it over in our comments to avoid confusion.
Of course we all know, as you point out, that Humanism is a religion.
….. carry on …..