Why Does Obama Hate Charities?!

Bobby,To put this into the wingnut context you must replace the word charities with church. The wingnuts are all crapping their cages because their TITHES AND OFFERINGS that they give to the Baby Jesus out of the love in their hearts won’t give them a massive tax break. Obama shut that argument down with, “I am sure people donating to charities do it for the right reasons not the tax structure.” HA!

More…I know without a shadow of a doubt that preacher all across the US are stirring the Glenn Batshit Crazy Sheeple of their churches and this was some more fuel for the fire.WHY DOES GOD HATE AMERICA?

Oh….WHY DOES GOD WANT OBAMA TO FAIL? HA!

Yay, yay, YAY!!! This is the most awesomest thing I’ve read so far. (I missed the presser last night.) It kills me that people can only “give” so they can get their tax break. How, exactly, is that giving??? As per usual, the loudest “Christians” fail to read the bible to, you know, actually say what Jesus said about this. Either that, or it says “If you have two cloaks, give your brother one, and make sure you get a receipt for the value of the cheaper one that you give away, so you can pay less tax to the Romans.”(and I just missed it.)

Although churches do receive a large portion of charitable donations, there are plenty of left wing not for profits out there this will effect.The bottom line really is, Obama is taking the “incentive” away to donate. Who really cares what the intention is…it is going to lower the amount of dough to organizations who help build strong communities, like Acorn.If I have more cash at home, I am more likely to give. Atleast most people feel they donate to better causes then the federal government.This statement is the same twisted statement as his peanut butter and jelly example from grade school. Yes, it is good to distribute wealth and share it, but giving away your food is one thing, having a teacher take it from you is another.

Every time I get a little vexed and worried (needing to “chill the fuck out”) it’s because I’m following the 24 hr. media cycle, which wants to fast forward everything so they can move on to… what, I’m not sure. What’s the big fucking rush?Anyways, my point is that I heard the president say “I got this!” last night. Well, he didn’t say that, but he did speak like an adult. He’s not playing to the 24 hr. news cycle, but rather the long game. And for that, I’m greatly relieved.

“Deducation”? Is that a word? Is that a deduction meant to specifically bolster education spending?

But notice in particular how he shamed the far-right and super rich for arguing that charitable giving is contingent upon the deduction.I noticed that last night…it was brilliant!

bob42,”Obama is taking the “incentive” away to donate”. unbelievable!what about the “incentive” to help people, feed people, clothe people, shelter people, give people hope and opportunity because you care about the value of their life not just to stroke your “charitable” ego because you can recoup your “investment”!

You guys, especially you, GItheJoe, are missing the point. And no, Joe, preachers all across America are not stirring up their batshit crazy sheeple. Where the fuck do you get this shit?You sit here on the left, and claim compassionate liberalism, all the while you verbally hate on, and slam anyone who disagrees with you.Learn this lesson now, Josh, before it’s too late. There are very good people on both sides. Yes, Joe, even people who follow Jesus. You dehumanize them based on religion? Based on what? You know almost none of them, and yet have no problem calling them all sorts of names in an effort to belittle them, due ENTIRELY to your ignorance about what drives them and who they are.If you learn that lesson, maybe the next time you are called to defend a people you know nothing about will be a bit more acceptable. The world isn’t filled with only good people and only bad people. The shades of color in between make up the vast majority of humanity. But never, ever forget that we are ALL humanity, even the ones who you think are batshit crazy. That changes EVERYTHING.I say this, Joe, not to hurt you, not even to argue with you, but to wake you up to what is your responsibility, your honor, your privilege to serve. You don’t serve our President. You don’t only erve the people you agree with. You the serve the people he works for. That includes EVERYONE, even the people you disagree with, or dislike. You protect them all.You’ve got a keen mind, Joe, but you are wasting it on hate. Your mission in this world is larger than that. Don’t let the lesser thoughts that dominate the minds of men who hate control you, ever. You are so much better than that.Maybe you’ve become disillusioned, but being a realist was your only hope anyway. Now you see what you think is wrong in the world, and your job as an officer puts you uniquely in a position to start fixing it, beginning with the very men you will lead. That’s your privilege, that’s your honor, and it’s all on the line starting today. But you will fail if you go about it the way you do here.If you want America to be better, then be better yourself, better than you ever imagined you could be. Leave the hate, the division, the strife to the pundits and politicians. They get paid to be asswipes. You don’t.Joe, take it from someone who knows, who’s made the same mistakes.

I agree the outrage against this is all about churches.If you are a charitable person, if you have causes or beliefs you cherish, you will support them. For most of us, reality is that we will probably support them slightly less right now because as Bob42 said – if he has more cash at home he is more likely to give. And that is the nut of the issue. Contributions to charities are down because people have less or are worried they will have less at some point in the future at home.Dropping the deduction I can take for my charitable giving on future years taxes doesn’t put more money in my home right now.Most people (but by no means all) do the right thing. They support what they believe in because they believe in it. The tax deduction is nice incentive, but it doesn’t change anyone’s social conscious. If it does, then they don’t really have a social conscious.

Bob42,Are you really saying that because your donation will now be only 28% deductable instead of the rate you deduct now (maybe 36% or 39%), that $.12 per dollar is going to make a difference in whether you give to a charity?My incentive to give to a charity isn’t based on how much I can deduct. That’s why it’s called “charity.” It may affect people with your view, but I think that you are in the minority.

PPP,There are good people that follow Jesus. I follow Jesus, and I try to be one of them. The problem is the vocal Christians act very unlike what I was taught. The word Christianity has come to be synonymous with “judgmental” and “intolerant” and worst, “hypocritical.” I want my religion back. I don’t want to be embarrassed to wear my crucifix. I’m sick of it, and I am glad to see that the president is calling people out on it.I also see the anger that people feel against Christians, and, though I wish there were less of it, when I have to read that there is a “Christian” group of people who claim that the plane crash that killed seventeen people, including children, in Montana is retribution because one of the people on board was part of a clinic that performed abortions, then it angers me.The hate might be overmuch, but it is understandable.

PPP,Joe and I grew up steeped in fanatical right-wing Christian beliefs. Our father is a pastor. Joe knows exactly what he’s talking about because we’ve been smacked in the face with it for 28+ years.He is dead-on saying the churches are going to piss their pants. We’ve been in the belly of the beast with these people in several churches. The song is always the same.His outrage at an intellectually bankrupt CULT is well justified because this thinking (Or lack thereof.) had a stranglehold on our country for the past eight years. (If not more, since Reagan married Republicans and zealots through prosperity theology.)Adding… Joe went to war because God told our president to do it. I think that gives him some wiggle room to be angered. Not to mention the religious zealots who lapped up the Iraq War and justified it with, no joke, “Well, there’s war in the bible.”Logic FTW!

From The Dictionary:

cru·sade (krū-sād’)1. often Crusade : Any of the military expeditions undertaken by European Christians in the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries to recover the Holy Land from the Muslims.2. A holy war undertaken with papal sanction.

From George W. Bush, September 16, 2001:

This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while, but we will rid the world of the evil-doers.

This is the 21st Century. We need to slough religion from our politics like the brittle, ancient, and useless skin that it is.

The amount people give in donations to their church yearly is small in comparison to the amount some of the very wealthy give.Would these wealthy people donate to non profit charities if they were not allowed to write off that amount? If they give out of the goodness of their hearts, then why the need to complain if the amount is 38% or 28%. This is not saying that I don’t believe some of these church leaders are not doing some of this complaining. They well know they have parishioners who would continue giving the same large donations for that 38% tax write off.

Elvis wrote:>>>”Deducation”? Is that a word? Is that a deduction meant to specifically bolster education spending?HOO-HOO! Zing!

ZING! KA-POW!

I may not have heard this correctly, but didn’t Obama say that middle income folks already can only deduct 28%, that higher income bracts for some reason can deduct at a higher rate? Sounded to me like he was talking about fairness in the tax code as well as contributing to charity for the right reasons.

Whether it’s from the goodness of their hearts or not, your missing the point. LESS MONEY! will be going to charities because of this.If a really really mean person who hates democrats or say, even independents, and is greedy, the CHARITY receives less money. WHO CARES if he has less of a social conscience. THE CHARITY, less money to do the things it needs.Final point that I would like to get out of you, whats the difference between a few percentage points. I challenge you to answer this, where do YOU draw the line. 40%, 50%, 73% tax bracket. You can always say a couple of percent won’t matter, but at some point it does. Right?

Bob42 said:

LESS MONEY! will be going to charities because of this.

I don’t think you are correct. Charities will receive less money because of the recession. I don’t know how you will what the impact of the tax law change will be.The rate of deduction that I am allowed for charitable contributions is never even considered when I give to charities. There are charities I donate to regularly. I would donate to them even if there was no AGI deduction on my taxes.Do you really think that everyone is motivated only by the almighty dollar and what’s in it for them?You have my pity.Tax exempt status for churches should be rescinded. I don’t want to subsidize the hateful hypocrites anymore.

Missed the point again Silly,Everyone is not motivated by the dollar, but some are. Those people will donate less, less to charities. Whether it effects you or not.Look at it this way, what if you were allowed to deduct 100%, nay, the government gave you 20$ for every 100 bucks you put in to charities. Maybe that wouldn’t impact you, but those who it would, you have to agree would donate more. Not tough to understand.Are you a capitalist? If not, you have my pity.

President Obama addressed intension. Do you intend charity to occur? If so, the delivery system ought not to matter.If you want to charitably put smiles on the faces of children with cleft palates and you understand that a charitable organization does this you can give to them to do this work. You could also understand that a better health care system would also do that and a taxed amount of your income would also be in essence charitable.We Americans have long ago and recently as well, have voted for representation to pass tax law that will indeed serve the common good as well as some specific instances of good.If the outcome is a smile put on the face of a previously disfigured child why would anyone care about the delivery system? The child is important, the care is important. The charity is more important than the tax deduction or the tax taken.

Mr. The Bob Forty-Two, if I may gild the lily for a moment and stoop to the colloquial, you’re something of a douche.Instead of shooting your Sexy Capitalist’s Mouth off about things you haven’t taken the time or effort to run through The Googles, maybe you should take both the time and the effort to run your opinions through The Googles. Because guess what? There’s a fucking Institute out there that does studies on these sorts of things, and — huzzah! — they’ve got data on hand that soundly refutes your blathering. To wit:

“Our estimates suggests that if these proposals had been in place in 2006, total itemized charitable giving by households would have dropped by 2.1 percent,” said Patrick M. Rooney, Ph.D., interim executive director of the Center on Philanthropy. “Charities and the public need to understand that in the current economic environment, which is creating difficulty for some nonprofits and their constituents already, this public policy change is likely to have an additional negative effect. However, changes in personal income and wealth, both of which have declined in the past year, have a greater impact on charitable giving than do tax rate changes.”

Ouch! 2.1%, that’s a real kick in the altruistic nuts, isn’t it, Mr. The Bob Forty-Two? And that’s taking BOTH the reduced amount of disposable income due to higher taxes and the lower deduction bracket together; when just considering the 35 to 28 percent drop in the deduction, the loss to charities was calculated at less than 1%. This is where I make a hissing noise through my teeth and wince in a highly mocking gesture of faux pain.Yes, coupled with the Big Fat Recession and the fact that kadrillionaires are suddenly living in Maytag washer boxes underneath overpasses, things will be rough for charities and non-profits until all that Fake Money comes back into the system, and yes the study concludes that — DUH! — more tax incentives to do so make the ultra-wealthy more likely to donate, but frankly I’m not losing any sleep over a 2.1% drop in charitable giving if the difference ends up supporting health care and education for everyone.

Hey look! More data!

The 2008 Bank of America survey asked people how they thought their giving would change if they received no charitable deduction at all: 52 percent said it would stay the same, and just over 1 percent said it would increase. Nearly 4 in 10 (37 percent) said it would decrease somewhat and only 10 percent said it would dramatically decrease.

So 90% of Charitable Givers are actually in it for the Charitability of the Charitableness, and not so much the Fucking Tax Code Glee one gets when writing off a whopping great chunk of cash that also accidentally helps cure The Cancer or fixes a cleft palate. Ten percent are dicks.More than half said no change whatsoever. Good for them. But that 1% that said it would increase is clearly insane.

Elvis,I’m glad you looked up the numbers to the web address, and also that you used your Thesaurus.Elvis, with the language really…Well the 10% dicks you just lost. (I thought you were the compassionate ones) Obviously a recession causes a downturn in charitable giving, I didn’t have to quote the numbers of the google to tell you that one. All things being equal, less incentive, less giving, heck less driving/eating/investing.Ya, 2.1% is very low to charitable giving. But not quite as low as the .1% bonus in bailout money you got stuck in a bunch over for the AIG execs. The study shows a decrease in charitable giving due to this policy. Huzzah! (with your permission) You proved my point, thanks. (My partner will be happy to hear you called me sexy)bjritz,I agree if it the money goes to the same sort of research, the delivery system doesn’t much matter. It’s government, whose proven time and again to be a little on the inefficient side when it comes to these sorts of things. Did someone say education…Oh yeah, the other thing, you can’t legislate morality.

Oh yeah, the other thing, you can’t legislate morality.

Please tell this to the folks that want to outlaw abortions and prevent same sex marriages. Also the folks that think we should keep people locked up because they smoked a plant need a heads up.You really should not be so proud of what Capitalism has brought us recently.

The biggest blow to charities has been the stock markiet crashing. Endowments are down 25 to 40%. For some, that effectively shuts down what they grant out. A number of states have regulations on spending policy which state that when an endowment goes below the historic gift value (just donations, no earnings from investments included) they can’t spend ANY of it. Colleges, symphonies, libraries, museums, food kitchens, homeless and abused victims shelters…all are impacted by that.People who regularly give gifts of stock are finding that the gifts aren’t worth much anymore. Real estate gifts become white elephants for the non-profits. Good going there, SWGILM.BTW, my experience is that in times of economic downturn, it’s the middle & lower classes that step up to the plate, digging deep, and giving what they can – perhaps they know how close they are to being the people who need the services of food pantries. Many of them get NO deductions at all because they can’t itemize on their 1040s.There are also a HUGE number of well-to-do people who give because they truly care about the causes to which they are donating. Any tax deduction is nice, but a few percentage points won’t affect those who give thru the goodness of their hearts. There are any number of ways in which the wealthy can give and get decent tax deductions – CRATs, CGAs, bequests, etc.

Silly,You never answered my tax % question. What % is too high, 36, 39, 86…Do you believe in removal of private property?Also, what do you consider yourself. I’m not attacking, but a communist, socialist, facist. statist, nationalist, pragmatist, neo whatever (all buzz words, but give me some of your core political beliefs)…At least I’ll know where you coming from here.