Charitable Contributions

Society has things backwards. Ordinary, domestic, profit-oriented businesses ought not be taxed on income. (They just pass the tax on, as part of the cost of doing business.)
It is the non-profit entities (individual consumers, clubs, charities, foundations) that should be taxed. And not on income, but on consumption. Individuals need to be encouraged to save for their retirements and to be discouraged from consuming beyond their means.
That would produce waves, but they would settle down into a condition that would be more lastingly sustainable. People would come to spend their resources on more sustainable values. Counterproductive, parasitical "charities" would fall by the wayside.

Too many churches have become heretical to their founding purposes and mere rationalizers for Leftist monsters. Tax them! Free them from the yoke the Prog Establishment has put them under.

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Well, how many churches surreptitiously instill a desire in their congregants to vote for taxes to take other people's money, to redistribute it to their favored projects as "charity"?  How did the Black vote become so uniformly dedicated to the Democrat Party?

My point is that gang banging to take opm is not charity. I don't want to stop spiritual mindedness from influencing the public square.  What I want to discourage is church instigated campaigns to vote for "forcing charity" by increasing taxes against targeted victims.  Forced charity is not really charity.

Moreover, charitable deductions should never have been intended to preclude spiritually moral minded people from voicing their concerns for the public square.  Yet, if non-Black ministers do not want to risk their congregants losing their tax deductions, they are generally required to avoid instilling messages that relate spiritual morality to public affairs. 

Among obedient churches, this tends to make their spiritual morality irrelevant to the public square.  As I look at how low our society has fallen, that concerns me.  Perhaps this does not concern you?

If you are really interested, libraries are filled with history books demonstrating how missionaries and mercantilists often worked hand in glove. The Clinton Foundation's "charitable" acts in Haiti are in recent news. It is easy to go back and check the Art charities that displayed Pis Christ. Foundations set up by elitists as tax dodges tend not to serve interests that most people would consider charitable.

A counterproductive way that gov sometimes encourages charitable giving is by increasing tax rates in order to make charitable deductions more attractive. Especially if the deductions can go for a foundation that mainly serves the class of large givers.

So long as "charity" is so tied to devices for avoiding taxes or using opm, it becomes more like fraud and corruption and less like charity. And users become less thankful and more entitlement demanding.

I did not say this state of affairs is always corrupt. I say it is leaned to corruption.

The people that are truly charitable, spiritual, and religious will not stop giving merely because they lose some deductions. Rather, their gifts will be dearer, recipients will be more thankful, corruptocrats will be closer watched, and spiritual mindedness about common decency will have more opportunity to be heard concerning public affairs.

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See http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-surprising-relationship-between-taxes-and-charitable-giving-1450062191:

The results show that the money and taxes relationship is a lot more nuanced than the idea that a bigger deduction means a bigger donation—with significant implications for both charities and policy makers.

According to the survey, people’s main motivations for giving were to make a difference (73.5%) and for personal satisfaction (73.1%).
Receiving a tax benefit came way down in 11th place in the list of possible reasons, cited by just 34.4% of respondents. And most people insisted that they’d still give the same amount even if they received no income-tax deduction for charitable giving.

[W]hen people know that the government is contributing to a charity, they feel less need to make personal contributions, because their tax money is already going to that cause. But it’s also because of the behavior of the charities themselves.

“A lot of that fall in private giving is attributable to the charity cutting back on its fundraising efforts” when they get government grants, says Prof. Payne.