What do you think is the nation’s biggest charity? The United Way? The American Cancer Society? The Salvation Army? Nope. It’s something called Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund, which is also…
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What do you think is the nation’s biggest charity? The United Way? The American Cancer Society? The Salvation Army? Nope. It’s something called Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund, which is also the largest donor-advised fund in the U.S. The rocket-like growth of this and other donor-advised funds with total donations of $23 billion in 2016 — an increasingly popular way to donate to charity and get substantial tax breaks — is exactly why the vehicle now has a giant bull’s-eye on it.
The title of a new, scathing report by the liberal Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) attacking donor-advised funds, Warehousing Wealth: Donor-Advised Charity Funds Sequestering Billions in the Face of Growing Inequality, says it all. “A fair amount of the funds could be deployed in a more timely way,” one of the study’s co-authors, Chuck Collins, told me. “There’s a wiring problem that should be corrected.”
President Trump signed the 2019 defense spending authorization bill on Monday, increasing domestic spending on what is already the world’s largest military. This comes as global military spending reaches the highest level since the end of the Cold War.
With the president’s signature, the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act approves $717 billion in spending on the US military and related industries, a $17 billion increase from 2018. Discretionary spending will increase by about $100 billion from 2017 levels, according to the Congressional Research Service. The legislation sets the bar for future defense spending, but appropriations bills are required to dole the money out.
Spending on overseas conflicts such as the 17-year-old war in Afghanistan will increase by more than $2 billion to $69 billion, the highest price tag since 2014. Taxpayers in the United States have spent about $5.6 trillion on the “war on terror” since 2001, and the nation continues to spend billions every year supporting operations in countries such as Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.
While Donald Trump — the preening peacock of the Potomac — goes around bragging (his favorite activity) about how many jobs he is creating, the renewable energy industry is quietly setting new records for job creation all across America. The Trumpeter went to Indiana last year to boast about how he had saved jobs at Carrier Air Conditioning. But almost as soon as he got his substantial bulk back on Air Force One, Carrier began laying workers off.
“They take advantage of that opportunity and they shoot into a crowd, no matter who they hit.”
The news this past weekend emerging from my fair city, Chicago, felt like news about wildfires sweeping across California: the sudden, hellish karma of climate change, that is to say, the gradual collapse of life-sustaining conditions on Planet Earth thanks to centuries of cluelessly exploitative human activity.
The news from Chicago was, of course, about gun violence: at least 74 people shot between Friday afternoon and Monday morning in a slew of unconnected incidents, including shots fired into large gatherings of people (at a funeral, at a block party). Eleven people were killed, including, in separate incidents, two 17-year-olds. An 11-year-old boy was among the injured.
Analysts at Goldman Sachs say S&P 500 companies are on a shopping spree, buying up shares of their own stocks. In a letter to clients this month, Goldman projected that by the end of the year, those stock buybacks will total $1 trillion, an all-time high, according to Bloomberg.
One reason companies buy back stock: it takes some of their shares off the market, making each one more valuable.
“Because of the laws of supply and demand, that boosts their stock price,” said Sarah Anderson, global economy director at the Institute for Policy Studies. “And that makes their shareholders happy and it makes their executives happy.”
Companies may be going on a buyback binge now because they have the money to spend, thanks to a roaring economy and the Republican tax cut, which sliced the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent.
Republicans and Democrats like to claim that they are on opposite sides of important issues. Of course, depending on which way the wind blows, they sometimes change sides, like over support for free trade and federal deficits. Tragically, however, there is no division when it comes to militarism.
For example, the federal budget for fiscal year 2018 (which ends on September 30, 2018), included more money for the military than even President Trump requested. Trump had asked for a military budget of $603 billion, a sizeable $25 billion increase over fiscal year 2017 levels; Congress approved $629 billion. Trump had also asked for $65 billion to finance current warfighting, a bump of $5 billion; Congress approved $71 billion. The National Defense Authorization Act of 2018, which set the target budget for the Department of Defense at this high level, was approved by the Senate in a September 2017 vote of 89-9.
In the words of the New York Times: “In a rare act of bipartisanship on Capitol Hill, the Senate passed a $700 billion defense policy bill . . . that sets forth a muscular vision of America as a global power, with a Pentagon budget that far exceeds what President Trump has asked for.”
The Silicon Valley Community Foundation grew into the largest philanthropy of its kind over the last decade by jumping on a trend: It offered technology’s nouveau riche an attractive charitable account that shields their wealth from taxes, but doesn’t require them to disburse it right away to charities.
Now, as the foundation seeks new leadership following a scandal that led to its top officials’ ouster, local charities are urging new direction, arguing that these so-called “donor-advised funds” have shortchanged Silicon Valley’s needy.
“Many of our members expressed specific concerns around the foundation’s strategy with donor-advised funds and the need to encourage donors to give locally into programs that address poverty, health, transportation, environment, and other basic needs,” Silicon Valley Council of Nonprofits wrote to the foundation’s board July 19.
Media mogul Oprah Winfrey is worth nearly $3 billion.
Basketball legend-turned-businessman Michael Jordan’s net worth is a reported $1.65 billion.
Businessman and philanthropist Robert Smith is worth more than both of them with an estimated net value of $4 billion-plus.
All three black billionaires are known as generous philanthropists, but not big political givers — they are rarely mentioned in the same breath as political megadonors Charles and David Koch, George Soros and Tom Steyer.
Winfrey, Jordan and Smith aren’t anomalies, either. The nation’s wealthiest African-Americans are decidedly reluctant campaign contributors, almost completely ceding the rarefied rank of “political megadonor” to older, white men, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of Federal Election Commission and Center for Responsive Politics data.
Congressional Republicans and President Trump continue to push their sole legislative accomplishment, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, as a game-changer for average working Americans — but the benefits of that bill appear to be going mostly to the people at the top.
Rather than delivering an “economic turnaround of historic proportions,” as Trump boasted last week, the bill will likely end up costing well over $1.4 trillion dollars and will instead provide corporations and the wealthiest Americans a giant hand-out.
A recent Politico review of Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings also revealed corporate executives, who often receive most of their compensation in stock, have been profiting enormously off the bill, which slashes the corporate tax rate to 21 percent.
VANCOUVER—An American lawyer is criticizing a long-held and unspoken convention allowing some Canadians to cross into the United States freely despite having publicly admitted to prior drug use while others are slapped with lifetime bans.
Under U.S. federal law, Canadian travelers who admit to using cannabis or other illicit substances are inadmissible to the United States. But this law has always been applied inconsistently, said Len Saunders, a Blaine, Wash.-based immigration lawyer.
“It’s this inconsistent application of the law that drives me crazy,” he said.
Margaret Trudeau, mother of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, was allowed into the United States in 2016 for a state dinner with President Obama, despite having admitted in writing to having used cannabis. And that, Saunders said, is maddening.
The WCG report notes that the top marginal tax rate was 91% in 1960 before it started dropping during the Kennedy administration. The effective rate (total tax paid on gross…
