John Williams wrote:
On Sun, Sep 6, 2009 at 8:56 PM, David Hobby<hob...@newpaltz.edu> wrote:
(Anyway, aren't charitable
contributions tax-deductible?)
You do realize that tax-deductible means that your taxes are reduced
by some fraction of the amount you donate, not the whole amount? Less
than half, in fact.
Yes, of course. The other is called a tax credit.
You can't very well expect to get full tax credits
for charitable donations, since it would be easy
to arrange to get some of that benefit back from
the "charity". (By having it hire your children,
or some such. My wife worked for an arts foundation
that had exactly that arrangement.)
For all I know, you could actually be spending all your
money on things that hurt the common good. So the above
is not a very convincing argument.
There are also people who cheat on their taxes. And those who commit
fraud to get government money that they are not legally entitled to. I
do not assume that your views are invalid because you might possibly
be one of those people.
Your argument seemed to be: "Money I pay in taxes
is money I won't give to worthy charities." I didn't
buy the ARGUMENT, for obvious reasons. That was not
an attack on your views.
I think we both want things to be "fair" as we perceive
it. You're worried about your money being spent on
people who don't deserve it. I'm not that concerned
about that, and am prepared to accept a bit of waste.
But apparently you are also prepared to accept waste of other people's
money. How is it fair for you to waste other people's money?
For the last time, MONEY YOU PAY IN TAXES IS NO LONGER
YOUR MONEY. It then belongs to the government. We can
talk about how we don't want the Government to waste
its money. Or we could start a separate thread about
"Taxation is theft". I'm not too excited about that topic,
unless you want to outline how you would run a country
without collecting taxes. That would be an interesting
problem, although I expect there's no practical solution...
---David
_______________________________________________
http://mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
