In their 2018 return, [Sen. Kamala] Harris and her husband, attorney Doug Emhoff, listed an adjusted gross income of $1.89 million, including Harris’ Senate salary and $320,000 she made from writing a book, “The Truths We Hold.” Harris and Emhoff married in 2014, then began filing jointly. In 2018, they paid $563,426 in federal taxes and donated $27,000 to charity.
Like many progressives, they are not very generous with their own money. If a couple with an income of $63,000 were to donate the same percentage of their income to charity, it would amount to just $900.
Yet, because of their generosity with other people’s money, these sorts of politicians can be heroes.
Not to mention that because of the fixed costs of housing, food, clothing, and transportation, $900 would be much more painful for the $63,000 couple than $27,000 would be for Kamala’s family.
What make this worse for Harris is the fact that progressives seem to emphasize the declining marginal utility of money.
Yeah, but she paid a bunch of money in taxes, much of which (at least in her view) goes to support the needy. I don’t think it’s crazy for progressives to claim that the gov’t should take care of the poor instead of leaving it up to individuals and their contributions to charity.
You might disagree with this idea, but the point I’m making is that it’s certainly not hypocritical of her.
It’d be like claiming that extreme libertarians are hypocritical for driving on government roads.
I don’t think the main point is that she’s a hypocrite, but rather that there’s nothing virtuous about merely being generous on other people’s behalf. Politicians who are so vicariously generous shouldn’t be credited morally for this vicarious generosity.
Original CC:
I might be more open to your “idea” had the last line read:
“In 2018, they paid $563,426 in federal taxes and donated [an additional] $27,000 to
charitythe U.S. Treasury.“Let’s phrase this another way.
In WWII we had a draft. Everyone agrees that WWII was a “good war”. Yet apparently we didn’t have enough volunteers.
I guess we could say that there was broad support for the idea of going to war, but individuals being individuals nobody wants to stick their specific neck out. There was a vague sense that “if we all draw lots and I get called, I’ll do my duty.” The draft was seen as a fair way of distributing the duty everyone sort of agreed was necessary without asking individuals to come forward and take it all on themselves.
Nobody protested the draft in WWII, and in fact anyone that tried to get out of the draft was seen as a coward. So while not everyone volunteered, there was some sort of broad societal buy-in to the draft concept.
By contrast, the Vietnam draft didn’t have broad support. Many people didn’t think we should be in the war. Many people protested and dodged the draft. And many people that said they supported the war got all sorts of draft deferments (something that would have been a scandal in WWII). I think in that case you could say that the draft (and war) didn’t have broad support, and people hypocritically avoiding it while advocating it were big time hypocrites. Their hypocrisy being a manifestation of the broader illegitimacy of the war.
So take the same tack with taxes (or any of the ways government spends its money). It’s not that you need to pay extra taxes to the treasury (volunteer for the war) to “truly support” what they are doing. However, its not a great sign if you won’t do so. Just like say sending your kids to private school doesn’t automatically mean you don’t believe in public education, but it’s not a great sign.
Fundamentally, the problem is that the way the government spends money (and thus how it funds that spending) isn’t getting a lot of buy-in from large swaths of the populace. So just like a war that isn’t getting broad buy-in those instances of hypocrisy just seem to be manifestations of the underlying lack of legitimacy.
@ The Original CC
You would have a point if Harris platform included maintaining current spending levels/taxation levels on the rich and was focused on shifting around the current burdens to different programs. However she has proposed extremely large and expensive programs, and significant tax cuts for the middle class with few offsetting spending cuts. Therefore her stance is clearly not that the current levels of taxation and spending are appropriate, and that is what makes it reprehensible behavior.
More or less as a percentage than the current WH occupant do we know yet?
“So what is the bottom line? Even including the $1 million Trump donated to veterans earlier this year (after prodding from Fahrenthold), the public records indicate that, over the past quarter of a century, he has given away less than $5 million of his own money. According to his own estimate, he is worth in excess of $10 billion. If we take him at his word, that means his charitable contributions come to about 0.05 per cent of his fortune, or five cents for every $100.”
https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/trump-and-the-truth-his-charitable-giving
We get to see the tax returns for Harris and her husband and we do not for Trump so the article is a best guess.
Steve
Although she has two grown stepchildren, she’s an attorney with no children of her own.
Childfree and practicing law – if everyone did this the progressive’s intergenerational dream of prosperity would be realized.
Apart from people who write checks to the churches they regularly attend, or placate their corporate bosses by payroll-checkoff donations to United Way, I don’t know why anyone in the lower 99.5% of the US income distribution claims significant charitable tax deductions.* For one thing, the IRS discourages charitable deductions, requiring written receipts for virtually all donations– you can no longer deduct the twenty bucks you drop into the poor box or building maintenance box of some church you’re visiting, unless you’re willing and able to roust out the rector or someone to write you a receipt. But much more importantly, American government at every level claims to do your charitable work for you, whether you like it or not. You are not merely taxed to provide roads or sewers or schools or police or armies or a myriad of “regulators.” You are taxed (heavily) to provide a vast array of social-welfare programs which politicians constantly advertise as moral obligations. Well, if your moral obligations are not just compelled but actually carried out by government– at your expense– why should you perform and pay for them all over again each year?
It is true, of course, that government is inefficient, that much of your tax money feeds bureaucrats rather than the deserving (or even undeserving) poor, but still, once government has appointed itself your agent for charitable works and seized that portion of your income which morality asks you to devote to charity, your moral obligations are discharged. No reasonable moral code demands you starve your children to make up for the inefficiencies of government.
*Of course a few folks deduct large “charitable” donations to fancy universities which they expect to favor their offspring. Such payments may be tax-deductible, but they are not really very charitable.
The idea that people should encounter real need and be generous; and that people can experience real need and have gratitude… this is true liberty. Taking other peoples’ money and inducing the entitlement of others to further theft – is absolute tyranny.
Well…even $900 sounds like a lot of money to me if you’re trying to raise a family on $63,000.
I would not sneer at a family that donates nearly $1,000 to charity if all they make is $63,000 in one year.
Took the words out of my mouth.
I gave almost nothing until I got married and my wife wanted to give to our church.
Partly, I felt that what the govt took from me was a substitute for charity. But there is no joy in it – it turns the transaction into highway robbery, with the intermediary (the IRS) as untouchable self-promoting shakedown artists.
Lefties ought to enjoy it. They like spending it, they should like giving it. But the lefties I know try the hardest to write off everything they possibly can, including donating their used underwear. I always felt the best way to convert a democrat into a republican (or libertarian) is for the IRS to pursue them as vigorously as they pursued me. I have spent more $ defending myself against the IRS than I’ve given to charity in my lifetime.
Mere charity is for losers. You need to reach philanthropist level to get status return on investment.
So she does not believe much in private charity (assuming she gave money to a charity, we don’t know). She’s free to not participate. I wish those who don’t believe much in many government activities could be free to not participate.
Giving money to tax exempts is probably foolish, given the rampant fraud, waste, and abuse that goes on in them. https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/many-of-the-largest-charities-in-america-are-giant-money-making-scams/ I think everybody at one time or another has run into missionaries or other such types abroad lounging around in a bar on a tax exempt’s dime to do work that takes a day or two but with 4 or 5 extra days for leisure built into the trip. I’d just as soon all the tax exemptions for so-called charities be eliminated, especially for education, policy, health, and union organizatons. Of course taxing income is counterproductive to begin with. It would be much simpler and pro-growth to stop penalizing work and just tax consumption. The most important benefit of doing so would be to stop allowing the tax code to nudge talent into tax exempt organizations that produce very little social welfare. Just the label “non-profit” with its moronic implicaton that there is something wrong with profit tells you the whole set-up for these outfits is a scam that needs to be put a stop too. Bravo to anyone who foregoes feeding the fraud.