disproportional empowerment of the wealthy beyond the fact that they simply have more to contribute:

1) right now charitable contributions (CC) are deductions, so higher income people (in higher brackets) are effectively getting a higher tax credit for the same contribution.

2) lower income people (renters with no mortgage interest deduction) almost always use their standard deduction, so they get NO credit for their contrubtions

undemocratic:

with qualified charities already acknowledged, the debate here is not if but how much to allow people to choose where their tax dollars go, specifically:

1) more or less than present? (increase/decrease the tax credit from the present 0-30%)

2) disprportionally biased to the higher tax brackets or not? (fixed percentage credit vs based on tax bracket and if itemizing deductions as it is now)

Therefor treating CCs as credits would unbias them toward the wealthy, in addition to allowing people to choose where their tax dollars go, using an already-in-place system (qualified charitably organizations).

Only 2 simple steps are neccesary to impliment:

1) move the charitable contributions line off schedule A onto 1040 as a percentage based tax credit. The specific percentage should be considered a seperate debate, discussed below, but likely starting off at the highest tax bracket as that would be the smoothest transition.

2) automaticly consider all government programs as qualified charities (so people can donate to the military, EPA, FDA, FTC, ATF, FBI, etc..)

=============== The percentage? -- *** This rest of this document is clearly biased toward my personal libertarian views, and should be considered a seperate debate from the above non-partisan debate. *** ==========

Start with the highest tax bracket, that will be the smoothest transition and will solve the issues in the above, seperate, debate.

Increase the percentage in future years.

Possibly enforce or guarentee in some way that the percentage may never be decreased, under the idea that any freedom granted to choose where our tax dollars go should not be taken away. This will ensure that though we may stall on the path to greater democracy, we will never loose any we have gained.

One concern that's been suggested is that when the percentage becomes very high, public opinion may sway too greatly for organizations, government or otherwise, to properly budget due to fluctuating income. My coralary in two points:

1) with an adequate phase in period, organizations would have ammassed sufficent reserves to overcome volatility in their supporters

2) such organizations best try to keep their supporters happy so they won't have that problem. that's their job anyway, right? If they fail to, that's free market action working it's magic. This as more moderate and praticle view than the 'abolish the IRS' libertarian philosophy that invites the argument "but who would contribute if noone was forced to". Ultimately the percentage could be as high as would be allowable for the IRS to do it's job making sure people are contributing. Though no forced contributions are clearly more in line with libertarian philosophy, as well as possibly mine, the above reform is praticle, easy to impliment, and difficult to argue against, while moving things quite effectively in the right direction. Thank you for your time. email qcsc at oth.net with comments