OPINION:
COMMENTARY:
Two items on President Obama’s legislative agenda are not particularly friendly to the idea of charitable giving. First, he went after charitable donors whose incomes are $250,000 or more. Under Mr. Obama’s proposal, for every dollar these income earners donate to charity, they will receive 28 cents as tax deductions as opposed to the current 35 cents.
Those defending the Obama plan say the president is just moving the charitable tax deductions back to what they were under the Reagan administration. What is being omitted from that argument, though, is that President Reagan also lowered the income tax rate to 28% for the wealthiest earners. This would mean more money was available to give to charities compared to today.
The Obama administration may very well prefer that Americans’ charitable urges could be satisfied through government run programs. The Senate on Tuesday passed a bill known as the “SERVE Act” which would expand AmeriCorps from 75,000 positions to 250,000 positions over eight years. The House last week passed a similar bill known as the “GIVE Act.” The price tag for taxpayers in the legislation is $6 billion.
Both the Obama tax proposal for charitable giving and the GIVE/SERVE Acts are dangerous roads to go down. Government cannot successfully duplicate what is already successful in the private sector. The Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac debacles, in which the government tried to mimic what the financial sector does, already have proven that. When both Fannie and Freddie failed recently, they were bailed out and no one was held accountable. Is this the standard of responsibility the American taxpayer should expect from these GIVE/SERVE acts?
Jim DeMint of South Carolina went to the floor of the Senate this Tuesday and spoke about the flaws in the Senate bill’s SERVE Act. “What works in America today is our civil society a lot of the volunteer groups that many of us have been a part of,” he said. “I know for years I spent more time in United Way and a lot of the charity groups, being on their boards back in my community, and I saw what the volunteer arts groups and PTAs and health groups did to build a strong community. ”
Sen. DeMint said, “Our history shows us when government gets involved, it tends to take something that is working and make it not work nearly as well. Civil society works because it is everything government is not.”
One needs to question what happens when the government ends up favoring one charitable cause over another. The House bill specifically bans any kind of religious activity in association with the program. Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-NC., inserted an amendment to the GIVE Act that would ban National Service recipients from political lobbying, endorsing or opposing legislation, organizing petitions, protests, boycotts, or strikes; providing or promoting abortions or referrals; or influencing union organizing.
Many of those supporting the GIVE and SERVE acts fought the parameters Foxx had inserted into the bill, further revealing the agenda of those pushing these taxpayer-supported “charities.” It is called pay up, put up, and shut-up. This seems to be the Democratic leadership’s idea of “volunteerism.”
In a press release, the president of the taxpayer group Americans For Limited Government, Bill Wilson, said, “The Senate has voted to gut taxpayer protections in the GIVE Act that would have prohibited lobbyists, political organizations, for-profits and labor groups from taking money under the program. And now only the House can put a stop to it by voting to reject the Senate’s amendments.”
Wilson warned that it will be easy for the groups prohibited under the House version to “get around toothless limits of the Senate version.”
“Because the money is fungible, or can be substituted by the organizations using accounting tricks, tax dollars will most certainly wind up being used for politics and lobbying,” Wilson warned.
Unfortunately, the Obama administration will continue to put government’s needs ahead of those who want to do real charity in the private sector. After all, a large portion of charity work is raising money from willing donors who believe in their cause. Mr. Obama, his administration and allies seem to see charity and charitable giving in a different light.
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