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This is correct. Money becomes slightly leveraged. If your tax rate is 37%, you effectively get spend to $1.37 for every $1 you remove from your taxable income.

This is correct. Money becomes slightly leveraged. If your tax rate is 37%, you effectively get spend to $1.37 for every $1 you remove from your taxable income. There's also estate taxes where you can create a foundation for large estates to avoid the ~16% tax rate. These are often used to fund political goals.

wahern 7y ago
> you effectively get spend to $1.37 for every $1 you remove from your taxable income But it's still an expenditure, and a bad one at that. Imagine you can spend $1 in the stock market or burn $1.37. Which one would you do? The very point of the article was that if political expenditures actually provided a substantial return we should see orders of magnitude more political expenditures. Estate tax avoidance is also a little misleading because you're only avoiding the estate tax, not income tax. Any money you move into a tax-exempt foundation would have already been taxed as income. So whether you shift it into your foundation or simply spend it all immediately by donating it to existing tax-exempt entities, what's the difference? In no situation does donating money either save you money or come out equal to not donating. Donating always costs you money, period. Your original point was that "donations are effectively free", which is categorically wrong.