The Red State blog also notices that Obama’s reduction of the charitable tax deduction will negatively affect charities in this country and concurs with my supposition of the motive:
With this proposal, President Obama is saying as directly as it can be said that the federal government is better able than private citizens and the charities they support to decide how these donation dollars are best distributed. Conservatives, by contrast, believe in the principle of subsidiarity — which in this instance means that charity is best performed at the most local and immediate level possible, and by “mediating” institutions rather than large, distant, and bureaucratic ones. This is not an abstract doctrine; it is based on the accumulated wisdom of the ages.
My take on this from a couple of days ago.
He would rather tax more and control the funds instead of letting citizens give to causes that may be opposed to his agenda.
The “accumulated wisdom of the ages” failed to defeat “change you can believe in” at the polls. We will see and live with the consequences.
Hmmm…I remember a discussion with a “progress-type” who insisted paying taxes was charity. He did not want to grasp the fact that if one decided to be uncharitable, the tax man would come a-knockin’ at the door (with handcuffs too.)
The simple answer: Obama is adding to the pot of money for huge payments he will make to the Demokrat vote buying machine. It is meant to keep the Dems forever in power by raising the numbers of dependents they have voting for them.
The $64,000 question is: “What will they do when they run out of taxpayers?”
I agree that Obama, like all liberals, wants government to control charity. However, as someone who falls in the dreaded HENRY (“High earner not rich yet”) category where we’re between the 250k and 500k in income that will be hit the hardest by Obama’s taxes, I can say decreasing the deduction on charitable giving won’t directly affect our donations. Thanks to the AMT, our deduction for charitable giving is so small anyway; tax benefit has never been a direct consideration for us in our giving.
What is going to hurt charitable giving is the overall increase in taxes from all the other areas. The money to pay the taxman has to come from somewhere. When it’s a choice between the kids’ private lessons, the cleaning lady, or the thousands given to charity, the easiest, most faceless pullback is in the charitable giving. And that’s almost certainly what’s going to happen.
We personally choose to tithe after taxes. Due to the rough economy our income will likely be lower anyway, but when the additional taxes are added in, by 2012 we’ll likely be giving 10k less to charity every year.