Philanthropy, Taxes and Hypocrisy

I don’t want to criticize anything as noble as Warren Buffet’s decision to give $40 billion to Bill Gates’ Foundation - which appears to do all sorts of good works- but I must note that there is a strong odor of hypocrisy coming from Buffet and Gates’ actions and statements.
The nation’s two richest men are both strong proponents of the inheritance tax and have publicly defended the death, yet both men are taking aggressive and very public moves to protect their fortunes from the very tax they claim to love. By turning all that money over to a charitable foundation Bill and Warren will avoid paying huge amounts of inheritance taxes. By resorting to philanthropy the two billionaires can ensure that their money is spent on their pet causes rather than taken away by the tax man.
These two staunch advocates of the inheritance tax are working hard to make sure that they don’t have to pay that tax. That is hypocrisy in its purest and most blatant form and the media and commentators are giving Warren and Bill a free ride.
If Warren Buffet and Bill Gates really believed in the inheritance tax they wouldn’t donate a cent to charity. They’d leave all their money to their heirs and make no attempt to give it to charity to ensure that Uncle Sam got his fair share. By donating all that money to charity Warren and Bill prove that they don’t believe in the inheritance tax and want to avoid paying it.
By ignoring Buffet and Gates’ hypocrisy the media is ignoring some pretty serious issues that we need to be discussing here. First, by letting the rich avoid taxes by donating their money to charitable foundations we take huge amounts of money out of the tax base. The government still needs funds to operate and the only way to make up for the taxes donated to charity is to raise taxes on the middle and working classes who can’t afford fancy tax lawyers to set up tax exempt charities. So instead of being equitable, the inheritance tax is actually unfair and slanted towards the rich. The rich get to fund their pet causes in perpetuity while Joe and Jane Sixpack and their descendants get stuck with the bill.
Second, not all of the tax exempt foundations set up by the rich are good, many of them are little more than bank accounts for political extremists, a means of allowing the wealthy to force their values on the rest of us long after they’re dead. The Ford Foundation and John and Catherine McArthur foundations finance left wing extremism, the Independence Institute in Colorado bankrolls much of the right.
Warren Buffet could have gotten the same tax benefits if he had donated $40 billion to the Adolph Hitler Memorial Foundation for Holocaust Denial or the Osama Bin Laden Institute for Higher Religious Studies. Obviously not all charitable giving is good and some charity can be destructive.
It is time for us as a society to take a hard look at both the Inheritance Tax and the idea of tax exempt charity. Both of which appear to be fueling the very inequality their proponents claim to value. Unfortunately today’s media and commentators don’t want to do that, they just want to be the wealthy’s lap dogs and clap and cheer whenever some fat cat avoids paying the income tax by funding his pet causes.