Anyone who contributes $100 to NPR deducts $100 from their income for tax purposes. So the public is paying, in that he or she would have paid $40-50 in taxes on it otherwise.
We can find plenty of taxpayers in NY, CA, or MA who have a marginal rate of 40-50%. They are the highly affluent people that those PBS pledge drives featuring Baby Boomer musical acts are aimed at.
Just look at the continued campaign to remove the $10,000 limit on State and Local Taxes. Where's that coming from?
No, it's not. Someone making $250k in California pays an effective Federal rate of 22% and state of 8%. Even someone making a million a year sees an effective rate of ~42%. (And that's before tax avoidance strategies they'll undoubtedly pursue.)
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/income-tax-calculator/califor...
Same thing for New York; $100k income nets out at a 20% effective rate. https://www.forbes.com/advisor/income-tax-calculator/new-yor...
(And these are single-filers. If you've got a family, it dips substantially further.)
> Just look at the continued campaign to remove the $10,000 limit on State and Local Taxes. Where's that coming from?
The $10k limit isn't a limit on taxes, it's on how much state/local tax paid you can deduct, set in 2017 as a way to punish high-tax blue states. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Cuts_and_Jobs_Act_of_2017
Pedantic. Obviously that's what I meant (and knew)
Learn about marginal tax rates. See, Forbes even tells you: "your marginal tax rate is 35%"
22% is the average tax rate. It's the *marginal" tax rate we're concerned with for deductions.
Itemized deductions these days are either extremely small (limited to a few hundred dollars) or only for the very wealthy.
During the Trump years, the standard deduction was doubled, with the result that vastly fewer people now itemize deductions. Yes, you can report a limited amount of tax-deductible donations, but last time I looked it was around $300/yr (and even that was easy to overlook).