What does Obama have against the poor?
Yesterday, Treasury Secretary Geithner was testifying in front of the Senate Finance Committee about President Obama's proposed budget. Among the controversies that he had to address was the proposal to limit deductions to charity for those with higher incomes. Geithner stated that the this proposal, along with the proposal to limit home interest deductions, were necessary in order to proceed with health-care "reform".
In these difficult economic times, why would anyone want to make it more costly to help the poor? Given the fact that President Obama just signed a $786 billion dollar stimulus package that was mostly pork, it's not likely that the President suddenly became a fiscal conservative. A relatively obvious answer lurks in the shadows. If donations to charity fall, people become more dependent on the government to provide food, shelter, and other basic necessities. This allows the government to control how people are helped, and also adds jobs - er, paper-pushers - to the Federal bureaucracy.
Personally, I'll stick with charities any day, as they are more efficient than Washington any day.
In these difficult economic times, why would anyone want to make it more costly to help the poor? Given the fact that President Obama just signed a $786 billion dollar stimulus package that was mostly pork, it's not likely that the President suddenly became a fiscal conservative. A relatively obvious answer lurks in the shadows. If donations to charity fall, people become more dependent on the government to provide food, shelter, and other basic necessities. This allows the government to control how people are helped, and also adds jobs - er, paper-pushers - to the Federal bureaucracy.
Personally, I'll stick with charities any day, as they are more efficient than Washington any day.
posted by David at 3/05/2009 08:27:00 AM
3 Comments:
Many charities are actually remarkably inefficient. I'm sure you actually choose good ones, but I've seen well over 90% overhead in places. And many very large charity donations are not to what I would consider important public causes, but are just "vanity" giving.
And at the same time we do have systematic problems with the health care machine in the UI, which are definitely not being addressed by charities. And I don't even see how they could be.
Don't get me wrong, I support charaty giving, and I think decentralization and empowering the people at the edges who actually do the work to do it better rather than centralizing decision making makes lots of sense.
I think that limiting contributions is not the best way to go about improving the overall system. But I think it is being suggested as a good faith attempt to improve on
I think it is actually a bit strange to claim that Obama has something against the poor, when in reality you have a difference of opinion about how best to help the poor.
Grab for power...
Obama uber alles.
I agree that some charities are very inefficient, and that some large charity donations are "vanity" giving. On the other hand, some giving that might be considered "vanity" giving has had a tremendous positive impact on society, such as that by the Rockefellers, Mellons, and other rich individuals. And many charities (such as the Salvation Army) manage to direct over 80% of their expenses to serving the poor. The United States Government can't even dream of matching that type of efficiency.
The current Administration could have identified many different ways to help fund its health care initiative. It could have tried some fiscal restraint, although as we have seen, it is making the extravagance of the Bush Administration look like child's play. It could have raised taxes across the board by a small amount. But instead, one of the proposed revenue generators is targeting charitable giving by wealthy individuals. Why would we want to dissuade individuals from helping society? I would prefer to have some wealthy individual funding a food bank that might bear his name rather than buying another yacht.
I think that the fact that the Obama Administration targeted this particular deduction first - prior to raiding all other sources of revenue first - shows that they either don't really value the good that charities do, or see them as competition to their own efforts.
Personally, I would like to see the charitable giving deduction extended into some level of a non-refundable tax credit, in order to promote serving the disadvantaged in our community. If people were given a dollar-for-dollar choice, I think they would prefer to send a dollar to the Salvation Army rather than building a bridge to nowhere.
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