Personal Tax News

Is Giving by Wealthy Immune to Tax Changes?

I seriously doubt the conclusion of the study. If you only measure people by lip service, it is not hard to imagine the wealthy guys will not admit they may second guess their charitable efforts if tax breaks are gone.

For those who are interested, a worthy accompanying reading is the featured article Charity Is Selfish, The economic case against philanthropy at Slate.

The researchers at the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, underwritten by Bank of America Corp., distributed 30,000 surveys between June and September in neighborhoods where the average household had liquid assets of $3 million or more. Responses from 945 were used in the analysis. The survey, designed as a nationally representative random sample, defined high-net-worth households as those with incomes of greater than $200,000 or assets over $1 million. Such homes represent 3.1% of U.S. households, the researchers said.

The results are at odds with several stereotypes about how and why rich people give to charity. Patrick Rooney, director of research at the center, said previous research has shown that giving declines generally when the value of tax deductions on the donation declines. But 52% of responding households said their giving would stay the same if they received no income-tax deductions for it. And 38% said such giving would somewhat decrease, but only 7% said it would dramatically decrease.

In addition, 56% said the amount they would leave to charity in an estate plan would remain the same if the estate tax were repealed. Politicians and charity officials have been arguing for years about whether a repeal of the estate tax would be good or bad for charity and society at large. Some wealthy Americans, including investor-philanthropists George Soros and Warren Buffett, have argued that doing so could hurt philanthropy by removing incentives to give to charity. But in the study, only a small percentage of high-net-worth households, 1.6%, said repealing the estate tax would dramatically decrease their charitable giving, while 3.9% said it would somewhat decrease giving. Prof. Rooney said that suggests the very rich are less sensitive to tax rates.