Charitable Giving of Obama, BIden, McCain, Palin

From Taxprof, it seems Biden is even stingier than Obama in his charitable giving.

Geithner's Tax Cheating

I just retired from the IRS this past summer. I can verily state we would have been fired on the spot if unreported income was discovered on our tax return. It is shocking that Timothy Geithner would head the IRS, the same organization that would have fired me for ANY unreported income. I am sure shock waves are rippling through my former IRS office right now to think that the new head of the IRS failed to pay $30,000 in taxes. (a comment here)

Tim Geithner really is a man in the spirit of Bill and Hillary Clinton: rules are for little people, but they don't apply to me.

Oh, those hapless Republicans! They don't realize that what they have here-- a knowing (that is, known since before the nomination was made public), deliberate, attempt to put a tax cheat in charge of tax enforcement-- is the ticket to victory in 2010.

I know everybody says good things about Geithner, but keep in mind two other things:

1. He was at the New York Fed while it totally botched oversight of the financial system.

2. Cheaters never cheat just once.

Alcohol Taxes

Philip Cook has a good post at VC on alcohol taxes. I might use it in G406.

As a thought experiment, consider increasing the alcohol tax by 10 cents per drink and then distributing the proceeds annually to every adult, $50 each. All but 7% would come out ahead on this deal. Given the preventive effect of higher alcohol prices, even that group would benefit from lower auto insurance rates and in other ways.

Average Tax Rates by Income

Prof. Mankiw reports CBO average tax figures by income level (all federal taxes included, including social security tax I suppose):

Lowest quintile: 4.3 percent
Second quintile: 9.9 percent
Middle quintile: 14.2 percent
Fourth quintile: 17.4 percent
Percentiles 81-90: 20.3 percent
Percentiles 91-95: 22.4 percent
Percentiles 96-99: 25.7 percent
Percentiles 99.0-99.5: 29.7 percent
Percentiles 99.5-99.9: 31.2 percent
Percentiles 99.9-99.99: 32.1 percent
Top 0.01 Percentile: 31.5 percent

The Charity Gift to an Individual-What Is It?

From Tom Smith at The Right Coast:

Something you can do these days is give someone the gift of having given a gift yourself to some charity. So you might get a card that says, We have given a goat on your behalf to the village of Ubuti in East Ubutistan. As a follow on, you might get a picture of the villagers posing with their new goat, which is from you, sort of.

I'm not saying this is not a nice thing. It is a nice thing. What puzzles me is just what it is. Not from a legal point of view. I'm not aware it raises any legal issues, interesting or otherwise. I just think it's a little baffling what it is. Is it a gift? Somebody says to you, instead of giving you something you don't really want or need, I have elected to give some people something they really do want and need. But then what does that have to do with me? Supposedly, the person sort of forgoing the gift gets the credit for it, but what credit is there, really? I didn't give anybody a gift. Nobody asked me if I wanted to forgo a gift in order to enable the goat giving. I just get a card that says, you just gave a goat to someone, to which I might reasonably respond, I did? Maybe the idea is that the giver thinks I am such a good person I would prefer to have a goat given than to get a gift myself. Well, thanks! If you get a gift of this sort, do you write a thank you note for it?

A commentor noted that the donor, but the not the quasi-recipient, gets the tax break.