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How the Rich Reap Huge Tax Breaks From Private Nonprofits

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Re: How the Rich Reap Huge Tax Breaks From Private Nonprofits

#71

Post by TacticalCoder »

nobodyandproud wrote: post #61
mycologos wrote: post #29

I know, I know, "bounties" are a fraught concept. Some people find "snitching" odious. But this is a tantalizing use case. All the author of this piece got out of their legwork was another article, but it also yielded some money for the federal government: > Two days after I emailed Finwall in April inquiring about the Xie Foundation’s purchase of the house, the foundation filed records with the California attorney g…

Another thought: What if all corporate accountants were required to be government employees? We can start with transnational companies first. Then LLCs and Incs. Disincentivize the massive fraud that we see today.

[flagged]

Re: How the Rich Reap Huge Tax Breaks From Private Nonprofits

#72

Post by kevingadd »

zo1 wrote: post #59
jmyeet wrote: post #24

Private foundations are really a massive scam on the public purse so whenever you hear about the Gates Foundation and the like, remember it's just a tax dodge, nothing more. The way the rules work, a private foundation has to spend 5% of its capital on its intended purpose. Thing is, that 5% can include "administration" costs like paying salaries and benefits for the family. They really need to raise this to 10%, min…

Can someone explain how that charity foundation thing is a loophole? Who/what is avoiding taxes?

What the OP described is that as a rich person you can set up a "charity foundation", donate a bunch of money to it (reducing your tax burden), then have the foundation hold on to most of the money and when it spends it, spend it on "administration", which could be hiring your friends and family to do fake administrative work

In the case of the Gates Foundation it's more likely to be real administrative work, but even the "good" ones are sitting on a ton of money that could potentially be put to more profitable (for society) uses

Re: How the Rich Reap Huge Tax Breaks From Private Nonprofits

#73

Post by LapsangGuzzler »

brigadier132 wrote: post #43
dools wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bigger problem is a fear of public spending because of perceived incompetence. The stigma comes from a time when only governments had run big bureaucratic systems. Now we can see there is little difference between public and private bureaucracies except for a lack of oversight on the latter. Still the stigma remains and all public spending is filtered through a profit making entity.

Can you actually give examples of competent public spending? The military is considered one of the competent parts of the US government and the amount of waste is staggering. On any given night 4000 people are sleeping on San Francisco's streets and the government can't solve that with a $636 million a year budget? The US spends more per student than any other nation and somehow we have worse educational outcomes?

> The military is considered one of the competent parts of the US government and the amount of waste is staggering.

This is not universally agreed upon. Military spending has been a deeply controversial topic along political lines given its overall amount and lack of transparency.

As far as examples of competent spending goes, there are plenty but they tend not to get as much attention as the failures do. A big example that most aren’t aware of are the government backed small business loans granted by SBA. Clean energy subsidies are another (Tesla was originally capitalized by a government clean energy grant).

You might not have known that about Tesla, but you’re more likely to have heard about Solyndra, which was funded by the same initiative and tarred in the press as an example of wasteful spending. US gov stimulates a ton of business investment behind the scenes that often goes unnoticed.

Re: How the Rich Reap Huge Tax Breaks From Private Nonprofits

#74

Post by brigadier132 »

afavour wrote: post #70
brigadier132 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Again: how do you think maintenance happens? Good point, let's get rid of all public programs except social security and road maintenance and lower everyone's taxes 20%. I'm not actually suggesting that but it's absurd to use road maintenance as the reason why the government needs more money.

Was that your way of admitting that road maintenance is an example of competent public spending while avoiding actually saying those words?

I mean, your argument seems to be that since the government does some good we should give them complete access to our bank account

Re: How the Rich Reap Huge Tax Breaks From Private Nonprofits

#75

Post by littlestymaar »

dools wrote: post #10
throwawayqqq11 wrote: post #2

As a side note: One of the primary reasons of how the rich get richer and how public services (our society) degrade is, that we stopped taxing them. For decades now. Imho, its a shift of the represented interests in policies. We should stop pondering enshitification or greedflation an start seeing it as a systemic issue, that we can observe everywhere. https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Commodification#In_Marxist_th...

The bigger problem is a fear of public spending because of perceived incompetence. The stigma comes from a time when only governments had run big bureaucratic systems. Now we can see there is little difference between public and private bureaucracies except for a lack of oversight on the latter. Still the stigma remains and all public spending is filtered through a profit making entity.

The “perceived incompetence” is propaganda-induced perception causes by the private sector and pro-business ideologists… (And when you defund public services it becomes a self-fullfilling prophecy)

Re: How the Rich Reap Huge Tax Breaks From Private Nonprofits

#76

Post by prepend »

afavour wrote: post #60
brigadier132 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taxes don't pay for utilities, I can't personally use libraries anymore because they've become defacto homeless shelters, the police suck. So now we are left with firefighters, national parks and local parks which I guess are not good targets for power hungry and incompetent politicians.

> I can't personally use libraries anymore because they've become defacto homeless shelters I’m sorry, I can’t take any of this seriously. I use my neighbourhood library regularly, take my kids there, it’s a wonderful place. I’m sorry you’ve had bad experiences (have you? Or did you just read online that libraries are full of homeless people?) but don’t extrapolate your experience out to a universal one.

For me libraries vary substantially. My local library in the burbs was nice, but they decided to close every Sunday and only open from 12-5 on Saturday. And oddly, 4 libraries about 10 miles apart from each other all closed after a storm due to rain damage. Even though they are different buildings build many years apart in different styles. It seems odd they wild all have water damage.

And while they are closed to the public, the employees are still working, they are just working from home. Every week. So their plan is to have remote workers doing library work on Sunday.

But when they are open, they are very nice places.

But drive 30 minutes into the major city and it’s not a nice place. There are many homeless inside so it is messy and not a very safe place, if you don’t want someone yelling at your kid.

I think it’s appropriate to use our own experiences with libraries to form judgements.

I’m glad you (and I) have good experiences, but should we extrapolate our experiences into universal ones? What makes you think all libraries are great like yours?

Re: How the Rich Reap Huge Tax Breaks From Private Nonprofits

#77

Post by prepend »

throwawayqqq11 wrote: post #14
willcipriano wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Do you know the last successful, citizen-only driven revolution? I would guess the french revolution ~1790 and it was a bloodbath. Today, the military technology has extended the power gap so much, that chopping heads off is no option for eg. north koreans without support from the outside. I think a violent revolution would only tighten the surveilance state.

I guess it depends on what you mean by citizen-only and successful.

How about Bolshevik? Or Cuba? Or Vietnam? Or China?

If you consider the French Revolution successful (that didn’t work out so well) then I guess you can say the Sudan revolution was successful as we now have South Sudan. Or Libya was successful as Qaddafi is still dead.

Re: How the Rich Reap Huge Tax Breaks From Private Nonprofits

#78

Post by afavour »

brigadier132 wrote: post #74
afavour wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was that your way of admitting that road maintenance is an example of competent public spending while avoiding actually saying those words?

I mean, your argument seems to be that since the government does some good we should give them complete access to our bank account

In what way is that my argument? You said:

> Can you actually give examples of competent public spending?

I gave you an example of competent public spending and you’ve somehow transformed that in your head into “we should give government unfettered access to our wallets”. Absurd generalisations are absurd.

You’re very obviously not coming to this discussion in good faith. Feel free to argue against straw men in your own time but I won’t be wasting my time joining you.

Re: How the Rich Reap Huge Tax Breaks From Private Nonprofits

#79

Post by nobodyandproud »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #71
nobodyandproud wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another thought: What if all corporate accountants were required to be government employees? We can start with transnational companies first. Then LLCs and Incs. Disincentivize the massive fraud that we see today.

[flagged]

You think Soviet Union.

I think Boeing and 737 Max:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/how-the-faa-al...

Re: How the Rich Reap Huge Tax Breaks From Private Nonprofits

#80

Post by redserk »

brigadier132 wrote: post #43
dools wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bigger problem is a fear of public spending because of perceived incompetence. The stigma comes from a time when only governments had run big bureaucratic systems. Now we can see there is little difference between public and private bureaucracies except for a lack of oversight on the latter. Still the stigma remains and all public spending is filtered through a profit making entity.

Can you actually give examples of competent public spending? The military is considered one of the competent parts of the US government and the amount of waste is staggering. On any given night 4000 people are sleeping on San Francisco's streets and the government can't solve that with a $636 million a year budget? The US spends more per student than any other nation and somehow we have worse educational outcomes?

Can you elaborate on what is competent spending?

The theory of privatization solving problems is predicated on the assumption that competition will exist. Competition in the private sector cannot be assumed to always exist.

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