Subscribe to Excerpts
Subscribe by Email
Love this account of a pissing match between Warren Buffett and Mitch McConnell. The Senator from Kentucky has been urging the Sage of Omaha to make voluntary contributions to the Treasury if he felt he was undertaxed. Buffett has now responded that he’ll match any such contributions made by Republican Senators. This dialogue makes in [...]
Archive for the ‘Taxation’ Category
January 2nd, 2012
Yet another commentator faults the 99 percenters for failing to see that Wall Street types contribute to “the public purse.” But they don’t. It’s their taxes that do.
December 27th, 2011
Category: Mitt Romney, Taxation
Willard Mitt Romney pays a lower tax rate on the millions of dollars he continues to earn from his asset-stripping activities at Bain Capital than ordinary folks pay on their income. Sounds like an issue to me.
December 20th, 2011
The most powerful argument in this LA Times op-ed piece opposing the charitable tax deduction is that it’s a poor trade-off. Retired foundation executive Jack Shakely points out that charities have permitted themselves to be shorn of their ability to influence policy and politics in return for a mess of pottage. Of course the restrictions [...]
November 2nd, 2011
Ellen Alberding’s interview with the Chicago Tribune in advance of the Independent Sector‘s meeting in Chicago earlier this week was not her, or philanthropy’s, finest hour. Ms. Alberding, head of the Joyce Foundation, described the Foundation’s approach to what even she characterizes as a perfect storm of increased need and reduced resources in the nonprofit [...]
October 27th, 2011
Matthew Yglesias offers some gracious words about my review of Paul Starr’s book on health care reform. But he professes “worry that Pollack’s take on this falls into the progressive reformer trap of underplaying the centrality of tax policy disagreements to current American politics.”
October 27th, 2011
Category: 501(c)(3), charity, Income distribution, Most interesting thing I learned today, NonProfits, Policy Analysis, Taxation
Kudos to my nonprofit consulting colleagues Campbell and Co. for sponsoring a study by the Indiana University Center on Philanthropy to determine the impact on giving of increased marginal tax rates and a cap the charitable-giving deduction. While some of us have been arguing that both of these moves toward social justice should be supported [...]
August 27th, 2011
Category: 2011 Democratic Agenda, Conservatism, Debt ceiling, Economics, Elections 2010 and 2012, Republican Party, Rhetoric and Framing, Stimulus, Taxation
Keith Humphreys’ thoughtful post called to mind some thoughts I wanted to jot down after re-reading Drew Westen’s NYT piece on Obama and Jonathan Chait’s blistering response to Westen in the New Republic. Westen is surely a primary target of Keith’s scorn, and I agree with both Chait and Keith that Westen grossly exaggerates what [...]
August 26th, 2011
Category: Arts and Cultural Policy, Built Environment, Health Care, Higher education, Illinois, Law Notes, NonProfits, Supreme Court, Taxation, Urban policy
When Harold Pollack wrote about the recent Illinois Department of Revenue decision to withdraw property tax exemptions from three hospitals, he naturally focused on the impact of the decision on health care. But those of us who work in other areas of the nonprofit sector are worried by the decision as well-or, if we aren’t, [...]
August 22nd, 2011
Category: Taxation
Always great to see a post by Robert Frank at RBC, this time him skewering the stale and intellectually dishonest argument that “anyone who thinks his taxes are too low can just choose to send in a check to the guvmint”. I have been vaporizing Tea Partiers who intone this dreck for the past few [...]
