Repeating his fine performance in Round One, Coburn zeroed in on two issues. First, he emphasized her evasiveness on the Second Amendment, picking up where Lindsay Graham left off. Indeed, he provoked, if not anger, at least visible frustration from the nominee. On this one, Coburn has the better of the argument: he is not asking for a “how will I rule” answer, he is asking for a “how would you look at the issue” answer. She is unwilling to give even that and he is right to be peeved about her evasion.
Second, he went back to her error from yesterday when she suggested she would have to know state law to opine on the legality of aborting a 38-week unborn child. This time around she said she “didn’t know” whether state law was supplanted by Casey. Really? Again — not well versed or playing hide-the-ball? Score another one for the doctor.
Re: taxing hospitals. Yesterday Gov. of Strickland of Ohio floated a balloon proposing to tax hospitals 1.7% of their gross income to help pay for Medicare. With luck this will go nowhere fast.
If the businesses can be taxed, why not the charities? If rich people can be taxed, why not the altruists?
Nothing worse than a demogogic hypocrite.
Of course, Republicans don’t have any problem advocating repeal of the “death tax,” even though the estate tax accounts for a tremendous percentage of charitable giving. In fact, the estate tax repeal proposed during the Bush administration would have reduced charitable giving by 17%, accordong to Michael Graetz, a Yale Law School professor and former Treasury official who has written a book about the issue.
The President did indicate that everyone will have to sacrifice…
That he appears so persistent in defending this suggests we are getting a deeper look at the peculiar pathologies that President Obama’s statist approach to social welfare and his own Chicago/Blagojevich style are likely to produce for the next four years or more. His combination of ideology and ruthless self-aggrandizement/careerism likely as not makes private charity doubly anathema. The “little platoons” of society trying to do good without big brother’s help cuts out political gatekeepers like Himself who bridle at getting neither credit (and political capital) for the good done, nor their cut. And the added bonus is that since this salvo is targeted at the rich he can brush off criticism as petty and self-interested – hence he gets to undermine charities and further play up class warfare rhetoric without appearing like a bag man out to snare more money for his own pet projects. Just like hitting up our combat-injured vets, Pres. Obama appears to have a problem with not punishing, much less honoring, any sacrifice or gift that he can’t marshal to his own ends – be they ideological or personal.
And come to think of it, his Special Olympics joke takes on a different meaning from this perspective, non?
If the pres wants to raise even more tax revenues from high earners than “going back to the Clinton rates,” he should be straight forward and raise the rate for all taxpayers rather than monkey with the charitable deduction. What he is proposing would effectively increase the tax rate beyond the “Clinton rates” only for those who are giving their money away, while leaving it at the “Clinton rates” for those who keep every penny for themselves. Why should we penalize those who share their resources while sheltering those who don’t?
Also, the president’s justification that he wants the high earner to receive the same benefit from a donation as Joe busdriver is a canard. Under current law, they both receive equal treatment–donations to qualifying charities are subtracted from taxable income. In other words, neither pays income taxes on the amount donated. The president’s proposal wants to change that and impose a tax on charitable contributions for the first time. (I recognize that not all taxpayers itemize deductions, but that is a whole different question and not part of the president’s premise in making his argument.) The only reason the president can make his comparative argument is because the federal government takes more of each dollar earned by the high earner.
Finally, I do not have the same take on the mortgage interest deduction. I understand the premise to be supporting/encouraging home ownership, but think it should be subject to some sort of cap. Subsidizing home ownership for people who are straining to buy a first time, two bedroom bungalow makes sense; subsidizing $500,000+ homes (to pick figure out of the air) that are larger than needed by people who no longer need the support to buy a home does not. Now how that can rectified is problematic, but an adjustment would certainly make sense, although the residential construction and mortgage industry likely has a different view.
The very existence of privately directed charitable contributions is an affront to any radical leftist—except when the left is out of power and needs private contributions to keep it afloat or when the left needs to elect its own members.
Who knows what the bad rich people might do if Big Brother did not channel their funds and energies?
We’re dealing here with enemies of freedom.
#7
Your first paragraph about the net revenue effect of the President’s proposal misses the point. Remember his answer in the debates to the question, in essence, “Why raise the capital gains tax rate when history shows that raising the rate actually reduces the revenue?” Candidate Obama muttered something about “fairness.” It isn’t really about raising revenue.
I think Americans have a hard time understanding how limited our government originally was, or even how limited it was at the beginning of the twentieth century. Its job was not to provide for every person who could not provide for himself. That was first the responsibility of the individual, and then the responsibility of fellow citizens, churches, religious charities, local institutions. There was a sense that the American people should care for the American people, rather than taking more and more money away from the American people so that an amorphous “government” can care for them. Better for people to be cared for by the people around them, rather than an impersonal, far-removed, massive governmental entity.
There are strengths and weaknesses to each model, of course, and one of the strengths of a governmental safety net is that it can probably do a better job of making sure that no one falls through the cracks. That may not necessarily be the case–local organizations presumably know the local situation, and who needs help, better than the capitals of our states and our nation–but it’s a plausible argument. The weakness, however, is the dissolution of the bonds of shared responsibility. I don’t need to care for that family in need, because that’s the job of the government. Or more precisely, rather than helping that family directly, keeping it a personal process and deepening the bonds of community, I help them indirectly by sending my money off to Boston or Washington, and the state and government then send that money to the people down the street. But the family in need, then, views government help as its entitlement, not as a gift from fellow citizens. There is no mutual giving and receiving, no care, no gratitude, no sense of accountability to use the money wisely, and no sense that I really should get back on my own two feet as soon as possible. I am not my brother’s keeper; Uncle Sam is; my neighbors are not helping me, Uncle Sam is, and Uncle Sam’s pockets are bottomless.
I don’t know whether Marty Feldstein is right when he suggests that the Obama folks didn’t realize what effect this would have on charities. It seems that the effect should be pretty obvious. Rather it seems like another attempt to take money and power away from local charitable institutions and increase the power of the government, in order ultimately to increase dependency on the government. Obama apparently would rather have people cared for by the government than by the people around them. In my view, if anything, the government should not be taking money from charities but should be giving money to them, diminishing its size and strengthening local institutions which can provide care in a more personal, specific and neighborly way.
I, President Barack Oprompter, will take from the charities and give it to my power structure, providing greater control over your undirected, irrational,clingy lives. I would also like to thank President Barack Oprompter, i mean, uh, scroll down please!
#3, I’d be happy to learn more about that, if you have linkage.
#10: “the government should not be taking money from charities but should be giving money to them”
I beg to differ:
/1/ If the government gives money to charities, then charities
will be dependent on the government, and the latter’s
power will be expanded.
/2/ The government can only give away other people’s money.
If the government taxes people to give their money to charities, that makes
charitable donation compulsory; and compulsory charity is not charity at all.
This distorts the very concept of charity.
Obama does not believe in charity. From 2000 to 2004 gave only 1% for their income to charity. Charity donations are for the rubes.
The Obama plan would of course reduce the amount given to charities by raising the after tax cost of making those contributions. This cannot possibly be in dispute, nothwithstanding Obama’s idiotic assertion to the contrary. The only question is how much.
Now I would posit that this is not a bug but a feature. Obama has two reasons for wanting to reduce the level of charitable giving. First, reducing the number and amount of charitable deductions results in higher tax revenues. Second, as a philosophical matter, the left has a problem with private parties deciding what social problems deserve charity; the New York Times had an editorial the other day making this point expressly. It’s better, say the lefties, for the Government to allocate funds to needy people rather than encourage or even permit private parties to do so since they might give the money to the wrong charities (universities or museums, say, rather than orphanages or hospitals). It’s too bad that Obama isn’t honest enough to own up to this.
Arthur C. Brooks predicted this in his book Who Really Cares, 2006, p. 181: “If liberals persist in their faith in government and antipathy to religion, the Democrats will become not only the party of secularism but also the party of uncharity. In the absence of change, fewer liberal voters will be moved by appeals to give to others, and it will be increasingly acceptable to express blatantly anticharity viewpoints in liberal circles. We could probably expect increasing attacks from the political left on private foundations, on favorable TAX TREATMENT FOR CHARITABLE GIFTS, and on private nonprofits (especially faith-based organizations) providing aid to the needy, education to children, and other services.”
3 makes an excellent point. Remember how vital all that charitable giving is next time you want repeal the estate tax. You’ve just painted yourselves into a corner.
According to a 2004 Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report, charities received between $13 billion and $25 billion in additional donations in 2000 because of the estate tax.
There was a strnage bit of illogic (or, possibly, an unintended logic) in the President’s answer. He said:
“In that sense, what it would do is it would equalize — when I give $100, I’d get the same amount of deduction as when some — a bus driver who’s making $50,000 a year, or $40,000 a year, gives that same $100. Right now, he gets 28 percent — he gets to write off 28 percent. I get to write off 39 percent. I don’t think that’s fair. ”
But, unless he believes in a flat tax, it’s perfectly fair, since the higher income person pays tax at 39%, whereas the bus draiver pays at 28% (if that). Did he inadvertently make an argument for a flat tax?
Contra, I basically agree. I didn’t mean government should do this on a regular basis, just that they should give back the money they’ve taken and no longer be in the business at all. In other words, not that this should be a regular feature, maintaining the size of government and using government to funnel money to charities, but that government should give back the money and permanently become smaller.
Regarding the death tax, I tend to doubt the CBO estimate, but, whatever the amount sent to charity. and however strongly I personally support and contribute to charities, I do not see how one can justify an unfair, unreasonable and counterproductive tax just because a small portion of the take is diverted to charity.
One might as easily justify an Obama proposal for new excise taxes on, say, sports equipment, justified on the grounds that a small portion of it would be used to fund charities. (O my God! I hope I haven’t given the bad guys a new idea!)
#3: “demogogic hypocrite”
“Demagogic” is spelled with an “a”;
and there is no hypocrisy involved, for this reason:
reduction in charitable donations may be a consequence of
repealing the estate tax – but it is unintended.
Those who advocate repealing the estate tax advocate
it in spite of this unintended consequence,
but never because of it.
Obama’s proposal, on the other hand, targets charitable donations
by the well-to-do directly and deliberately.
#17: There may be a way to reconcile practical abolition of the
estate tax with charity needs: make tax immunity conditional,
for large estates, on some portion (say 20%)
of the estate going to charities.
#19,Ahithophel: I basically agree
I thought you might: I argued with the letter of your words,
but not with your basic philosophy as I understand it.
Your idea of a one-time government divestment in favor
of charities is interesting. Such bold proposals may
become realistic when the pendulum swings from
the Obamista revolution to a Reaganite
counterrevolution.
Why not put a 28% cap on all deductions allowed individual taxpayers? Why stop at charities? Possible answer: Private Charities? Fuhgedaboudit!
PBO doesn’t care about charitable donations b/c he and his wife as well as the VP family have given a pittance to charities over the years; despite their earnings. From his viewpoint, he doesn’t benefit b/c he doesn’t donate.
If one wanted to recoup the amount of money that goes to charities, I’m sure there are more efficient ways of doing it.
What’s irritating about Obama’s raised tax on charitable giving is that it’s an under-the-table way of raising the tax rate on the wealthy. It’s just more sleight of hand. Why not just come out and raise the rate, if that’s what you’re effectively going to do in any case? Ah, yes, public relations.
But I thought we had put away childish things?
#7 … Since all the research shows that the more conservative people are, the more of their wealth they contribute to charity, Obama’s plan is perfectly sensible. Stick it to those who oppose your socialist, statist plans. Liberals will hardly feel anything since they contribute so little to charity to begin with. Democrats (liberals) are all the same….they love to give away other peoples’ money.