According to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, who reported last week on a survey conducted by the Americans for the Arts, a lobbying and research group in Washington and New York, the US economy may, indeed, be more closely tied to charitable giving than previously estimated. This does not bode well for a presidential candidate that might consider more heavily taxing the top 2-5% of the US population, and/or major corporations.
In 2007, private support for arts institutions, including museums, libraries, and public broadcasting, amounted to .5 billion, said New York Times last Thursday, a 17.5 percent increase from the 2005 total but far less than the .6 billion donated last year by private philanthropists to educational institutions in the United States. Compound those figures with charitable giving to medical research, social-service organizations, religious organizations, and other non-profit concerns, and it seems clear that a growing percentage of the US economy is funded philanthropically.
What the two principal presidential candidates have failed to address in this campaign is what effect their respective, proposed fiscal policies might have on the contributions made by major corporations and high-income individuals, and what a negative change in discretionary income might mean to the the overall patronage of the arts, social-service organizations, education, and researchers, if their respective fiscal policies were to be enacted.
A failure to fully understand the down-stream ramifications of increased taxation on large corporations and high-income individuals could cause a negatively reverberative shock wave through the US economy, thereby lengthening a recession and causing a swell in unemployment figures, when publicly-funded sectors of the economy can no longer afford to support operational budgets or staff salaries.
“When the government taxes some activity, less of that activity will be forthcoming,” explains Kenneth G. Elzinga, the Robert C. Taylor Professor of Economics at the University of Virginia. “Put more simply, when you tax something, you get less of it. A corollary of this principle is that if the government successfully taxes high incomes, and high income earners are the main donors to particular charities – such as the arts – there will be fewer contributions to the arts.”
The problem is that the US economy has already entered a period of recession, and non-profit organizations are already falling behind in advance of possible losses to taxation. Social feeding programs are not only forced to pay more for groceries with less donations, they are seeing a dramatic rise in the number of guests they feed, sometimes by as much as 20-25%. As a result, inflation is devouring the operational budgets of social-service feeding organizations from one end, while an increased demand for those services are devouring it from the other. Soup kitchens can ill afford to now lose donative funding due to a radical shift in federal taxation.
Under today’s tax laws, at least, all is not yet completely dire. Current tax laws do provide some opportunities where charitable contribution proves more beneficial than governmental taxation. “When my clients are taxed more, it doesn’t always follow that they contribute less,” says Rick Bloom, a certified financial planner in Rye Brook, New York. “I’m sure that is true for some, but others have assets that become so taxable, such as at death, with income and estate taxes applied in the case of qualified money, that they actually decide to put it into a charitable trust. Their attitude is ‘Instead of losing 76 percent or so between the estate and income taxes, lets put it in a trust that gives 100 percent to a charity, so we can then make our charitable contributions from that trust and get a tax break, rather than lose 76 percent and net the 24.’”
If those tax laws change with the incoming presidential administration, however, yet another avenue could be lost to philanthropic funding. Since neither major presidential candidate has discussed their sweeping economic reform plans in any detail, however, the voting public remains, just three days before a most important election, in the dark as to what they are voting for.
Herald de Paris, a new, worldwide news and information resource with zero corporate or political bias, formally launches on Monday, November 3rd, 2008, at http://parisherald.com. Our editors feel that this editorial is too timely to wait for Monday, however, and hope that its early publication will yield answers from the candidates, that allow the American voting public to make an informed choice when they go to cast their ballots on Tuesday, November 4th.
© 2008 Herald de Paris et. Cie., Ltd. May be re-used with permission
Tags: chronicle of philanthropy, operational budgets, private philanthropists, sectors of the economy, social service organizations