Law Commons^™

Charitable Subsidies And Nonprofit Governance: Comparing The Charitable Deduction With The Exemption For Endowment Income, David M. Schizer

Faculty Scholarship

Charitable subsidies are supposed to encourage positive externalities from charity. In principle, the government can pursue this goal by evaluating specific charitable initiatives and deciding how much each should receive. Although the government sometimes makes this sort of fine-grained judgment, this Article focuses on two income tax rules that leave the government essentially no discretion about which charities to fund: the deduction for donations to charity ("the deduction") and the exemption of a charity's investment income ("the exemption"). With each subsidy, federal dollars flow automatically as long as charities satisfy very general criteria.

As a result, these subsidies are especially …

Tax Expenditures As Foreign Aid, David E. Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

Few issues in global politics are as contentious as foreign aid – how much rich countries should give, in what ways, to whom. For years, it has been a commonplace that U.S. policies are stingy. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) routinely ranks the United States far behind its industrialized peers in official development assistance (ODA), measured as a percentage of gross national income (GNI). An endless parade of critics has implored the government to do more; some suggest that the Bush Administration's support for the Monterrey Consensus, which sets a goal of increasing assistance to 0.7% of …

Hidden Foreign Aid, David Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

Few issues in global politics are as contentious as foreign aid – how much rich countries should give, in what ways, to whom. For years, it has been a commonplace that U.S. policies are stingy. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) routinely ranks the United States far behind its industrialized peers in official development assistance (ODA), measured as a percentage of gross national income (GNI). An endless parade of critics has implored the government to do more; some suggest that the Bush Administration's support for the Monterrey Consensus, which sets a goal of increasing assistance to 0.7% of …

Remapping The Charitable Deduction, David Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

If charity begins at home, scholarship on the charitable deduction has stayed at home. In the vast legal literature, few authors have engaged the distinction between charitable contributions that are meant to be used within the United States and charitable contributions that are meant to be used abroad. Yet these two types of contributions are treated very differently in the Code and raise very different policy issues. As Americans' giving patterns and the U.S. nonprofit sector grow increasingly international, the distinction will only become more salient.

This Article offers the first exploration of how theories of the charitable deduction apply …