Clarice Feldman ping.
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Start with NGOs.
Shadow government banking system
At best most “non profits” are benign lazy entities that accomplish a smidgen of what for profit entities do. At worst, they are tax dodging/money raising schemes for con artists.
So true. All they have to do is not make a profit and they just do that by paying family and friends outrageous salaries.
The criminal MO to skim off tax-free money for themselves: The recipient Foundation takes a cut and deposits the rest of the donation offshore for the donor Foundation to use later.......all tax-free.
And many other use it as a way to get 500k salaries as CEO!
More of a tax dodge. Both Gates and Buffet scream for higher taxes on folks like themselves, while withholding all of their assets from taxes. Between the two families and their over $140 billion fortunes, after accounting for capital gains and estate taxes, they will have kept over $60 billion in taxes from the federal government.
I think the Clinton Foundation was actually set up in Canada. If so then they have already found a way around our laws on charitable foundations. I agree with the article, but the Clinton dodge must be accounted for!
Agree, Socialist DemoRats have prostituted the very concept of “charity” for elitist power over defenseless good citizens, and Republican have gone along for a cut of the loot.
Andrew Carnegie established his foundation with the objective of building libraries and providing churches with organs. Today the foundation is involved in funding many progressive causes, none of which are related to church organs or libraries in the United States. The foundation still does a small amount of library work in Africa.
One hundred years after most of the Carnegie libraries were constructed 1554 of the original 1681 buildings still exist and 911 are still used as libraries.
Would Carnegie approve of the activities of his foundation today? Do the activities of today’s foundation have the lasting positive impact on the society and culture as Carnegie’s library construction program? Would communities today, particularly small communities, benefit more from the construction or refurbishment of community libraries than the corporation’s current endeavors supporting liberal activist groups.
There is a long history in the US of foundations set up by wealthy philanthropists being taken over by progressive intellectuals who change goals of the organization to support the political and social objectives of the managers instead of the causes for which the philanthropist created the organization. Reform of large non-profits is long overdue. I suggest:
1) A 20 year horizon for non-profit status. At the end of 20 years the organization either liquidates or becomes fully taxable.
2) Income on the sale of merchandise and services by non-profits should be taxed. Goodwill, for example, competes with local merchants by selling donated merchandise. Its non-profit status allows it to avoid taxes on the goods it sells, while its private sector competitors pay for the goods they sell and pay taxes on the income.
3) Non-profits should pay property taxes on real estate and land owned by the non-profit but not used for the organization’s activities. Many large non-profits invest in property to generate streams of tax free rental income. By not having to pay property taxes, these non-profits have an advantage over the private sector landlords with whom they compete.
4) Non-profit status should be conditional on a limit to the amount of funds the organization can spend on overhead (say 5%) to insure the organization’s funds are being employed in the non-profit activity and not being used to pay high salaries.
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If Henry Ford and the Family principals who set up the Ford Foundation were able to comment on the same, those comments would probably be unprintable! This is the problem with these long-term foundations, their founder’s intentions get hijacked by trustees and administrators that ‘evolve’!
Even so, it took the IRS eighteen months to grant us 501(c)(3) status under Director of Exempt Organizations, Lois Lerner! I often wondered if the long wait had something to do with my being a conservative.
Re charitable foundations, like Ford, Pew etc: They tend to drift leftward, even if their founders were not leftists.
Iirc John M. Olin, knowing this, wrote a "self-destruct" clause into his foundation's documents. So his foundation disbursed his money to conservative causes for a few years - then dissolved itself before it could be taken over by leftists.
I see zero reason not to give “for profits” every advantage that nonprofits have.
At least the for-profits are honest about their goals.