tigertoy

Whenever you make an old fashioned snail mail contribution to almost any charity, you get put on a list where you will receive several more requests for more money from that charity. Thank you gifts, membership renewal requests, emergency donation requests, and reminders that you haven't contributed in a while years later. Worse, many legitimate-seeming charities will sell your name on to other charities and you can get dozens. The larger the contribution the more further appeals you receive. It's just the way the fundraising business works.

This is a terrible waste of the charity's resources, the donor's time and attention, and the environment that has to be burdened with all that trash. The last one is particularly ironic in the case of environmental causes.

I believe I have a solution to this problem. Imagine there was a service you could send your donations to. You would specify what charity the donation was for, and they would collect all the donations to that charity that had come in every couple of months and send it on anonymously. The charity would pay a very small surcharge, which would be far less than what it costs them to send out all that follow-up spam.

The donor could easily set up a recurring donation, and in any case could opt in to a single annual statement listing the charities they had donated to.

The main question I have about this would be whether the tax laws would allow it. I have heard that a 501(c)3 can make donations to other 501(c)3 organizations. This would allow the donor to retain the tax benefits and make it easy to account for them with the IRS. Even if the aggregator were a 501(c)4, the current tax law means there is no benefit for most taxpayers to donate to a 501(c)3, but I suspect that if the aggregator had to operate as a regular company it wouldn't work financially.

I would be interested to have someone with more knowledge than I comment on how far this could fly legally. Ideally such a person would be a lawyer, but I'm in no position to pay a lawyer for official legal advice.

I won't ever run for President.  I don't have the social skills to actually do the job, to say nothing of running a successful campaign.  But if filkertom can post his platform, I can post mine.

( My 10 point platform, because 10 is all the points anyone would read, and I want to go to bed early tonight. )

I just had an interesting thought about the political situation.

Most, if not all, of the political issues I really get worked up over are long term issues.  I worry about things that I see happening in five, or twenty, or even a hundred years far more than I worry about things in the next six months, because in terms of my day to day life, things are mostly OK for the immediate future, but the long term future seems bleak.

On those big issues -- global warming, overpopulation, the loss of wild places and the creatures that live there, the ever-mounting national debt, attacks on civil liberties in the name of fighting the bogeyman of terrorism, the religious right's attempts to force everyone to live by the rules of their religion -- I, and most of the people I hang out with metaphorically in the political sphere, take one position, and the Republican power structure and most of the people who hang out with them metaphorically take an opposing position.  This isn't news, of course; but what's interesting is that all of these issues are issues where I am really worried about the future that I see coming, and that is why I take the stands that I do.  I infer a common thread in their positions that they're worried about the present and not so much about the longer term future.

I find this interesting because I see the same dangerous and inappropriate lack of concern for the long term future in another area of modern American existence:  the management of publicly traded American corporations.  Because of the way our economy is structured, our corporations have a pathologically short time horizon for their decision making.  I could discuss this, and the reasons for it, at length, but I hope that my readers will accept that the problem exists, because it leads directly to my real point.

The real power behind the Bush gang is the money of the big corporate interests.  In a roundabout, but still real, way, the same people that call the shots for our corporations are the people who call the shots for our government -- because politicians who don't follow the agenda of the big money don't get the big money for their campaigns, which means they lose elections to candidates who do get that money.  And the people who call the shots in the big corporations are the people who have been able to rise to and hold onto power in our corporations, which necessarily means they're people who are used to thinking in terms of the short term and not the long term.  Executives who worry about the long term perform worse in the short term than executives that don't, so over time all the executives are only people who don't worry about the long term.  That mindset is the main thing that's wrong with our corporations.  My new thought is that that mindset is ultimately what's wrong with our politics too -- the lack of real concern for the future on the part of the Bush administration is directly caused by the structural short-sightedness of our corporations.

What follows are some thoughts that have been incubating in my subconscious for a few months.  I'm not sure that I'm prepared to express them profoundly or even clearly, but I need to try to say something.  It's been unusually hard for me to figure out how to approach writing this, but I'm going to take a swing at it now.

( some long ramblings on the ethics of prostitution )

All of us have our own ideas over just how large the role of government in society ought to be, but nearly all of us agree that government should be doing some things, and that in order to pay for those things, there must be some kind of taxes.  Nearly all of us also agree that part of what government should be doing in society is to discourage individuals from activities that are harmful to the rest of society.

Economics tells us that when an activity becomes more expensive, individuals will do it less.  Tax policy affects how much certain activities cost, and can profoundly influence behavior.  Some commentators consider it wrong to use tax policy to deliberately engineer behavior, but I think this view is both disingenuous and actively wrong.  I argue that government has an affirmative responsibility to consider the consequences of tax policy on behavior, and moreover to deliberately try to identify behavior that is harmful to society and tax that behavior roughly in proportion to how harmful it is to society.

I suspect that by specifically taxing products, services, and activities that do harm to society, we could raise enough money that we could significantly reduce the burden that our main revenue generating taxes place on things we generally think of as being good for society, like earning salaries, owning property, and selling goods.  I'm not prepared to say that we could actually replace all the taxes we have now with taxes on advertising, pollution, and using up non-renewable resources; nor do I deny that there can be problems with government relying on undesirable activities as sources of tax revenue.  I do, however, think it is a sound idea, and I will articulate three principles of good government:

• Consider taxation first.  If an activity by one group is unfairly burdening another group, see if there's a just way for a tax on the activity to pay for the burden.  If there's an activity that is tolerable at a low level but becomes detrimental when it is too widespread, see if taxing it can keep it at a tolerable level.  Taxation can't help all problems, but when it can, it is likely to be less of a burden on individual freedom than regulation.
• Keep taxes simple (but not too simple).  It should not take a lawyer to figure out how much tax you owe, or an accountant to actually pay it.  However, the tax does need to remain visible to the person whose behavior it is meant to affect, and directly proportional to their behavior.  As an example, imagine a tax on landfilled garbage intended to encourage recycling.  Requiring the trash man to sort through the trash he picks up and bill the homeowner $.10 for each soda bottle he finds is ridiculous; on the other hand, taxing the trash company an extra $100 per truckload likely means that they will just raise their flat fee by $1 per household.  To have the intended effect, the homeowner needs his bill to reflect each cubic foot that goes on the truck.
• Tax with intent.  Government must always consider the effect each element of tax policy has on behavior and society, and intend or at the very least accept that effect.  Tradition does not excuse government from this duty; just because we've always had a certain tax doesn't mean we always should.  If all taxes are intentional, there will be more argument over tax policy and quite possibly more complaints, but it does not follow that there will be more harm -- if the process works right, there will in fact be less harm.