just wanted to make a point that others seem to have missed. to the extent that this is avoiding taxes so that more money can be given to a particular charity, isn't it "robbing peter to pay paul"?
this might not make much sense to the american mindset, which seems to be virulently anti-government, but taxes don't just vanish - they pay for vital services. more than that, reducing how much tax someone with many millions pays implies that others, with less money, either pay more or receive lower quality services.
i realise this is a minor detailed compared to giving to charity or keeping it all, and i don't mean to detract from that. i just find the "it's cool to avoid taxes" (and instead give more to charity) assumption a bit odd.
The US government spends most of its money (roughly in order) on:
-Wall Street Bailout
-Military Spending (which, in large part, means pre-emptively attacking sovereign nations we don't like)
-Inefficient entitlement programs
-Interest on our existing debt
If memory serves, only about ~5% of our money goes to what I would consider really worthwhile programs like NASA and education. You can up that to about 20% if you include things like roads, infrastructure maintenance, 'vital services', and so on.
I imagine that Derek prefers to have more control over where his hard earned money goes.
Recently at work, I wondered if some acronym we were using was incorrect. I wrote my boss an email saying, basically, I think we have this wrong and got the reply "I googled it and it comes up so it's right." Um, yeah, I googled both terms before sending the email and both versions bring up this form. So I got curious and spent about 40 minutes searching for information to verify which acronym is actually correct. Ultimately, I found we were using the correct acronym. Curiously, most of the sites that were using the correct acronym were for-profit business sites and most of those using the incorrect acronym were government sites.
My point: Maybe if the American government were more competent, Americans wouldn't be so anti-tax.
this might not make much sense to the american mindset, which seems to be virulently anti-government, but taxes don't just vanish - they pay for vital services. more than that, reducing how much tax someone with many millions pays implies that others, with less money, either pay more or receive lower quality services.
i realise this is a minor detailed compared to giving to charity or keeping it all, and i don't mean to detract from that. i just find the "it's cool to avoid taxes" (and instead give more to charity) assumption a bit odd.