Thursday, March 26, 2009

Obama's new tax on charitable contributions

The Obama administration is planning, for the first time ever, to reduce the tax deduction for charitable contributions. Today those contributions are fully deductible. I don't pay any tax on money that I give to charities. Under Obama's new plan I will have to pay anywhere from 7% to 16% on contributions to charity. That's a chunk of change and will negatively impact how much we give. We budget how much we give each year and will have to lower our contributions to cover the tax. In some cases we may choose to simply not give to several organizations that have been borderline for us in the past. I want to give them a $, not give them 80 cents and the government 20 cents.

One thing I question is why Obama is doing this? Why hurt charities in this way? Could it be that he really doesn't care about the impact to charities? That he'd prefer if the charities didn't get the money at all so the government will have an excuse to step in and do things it's way instead of the way charities do things? Um...

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