Tax Breaks

Why Did Baltimore Lavish Tens Of Millions In Tax Breaks?

March 7, 2024 Taya Graham, Stephen Janis and Jayne Miller, The Real News Network. Educate! Affordable Housing, Baltimore, Maryland, Poverty, Tax Breaks, wealth inequality

Baltimore is often maligned as a shrinking city beset by crime and intractable poverty. But take a walk down President Street just south of Little Italy on a Friday night, and you will enter a world that appears far removed from the idea of a city that is terminally in decay. Past the empty pavilions of the Inner Harbor and east of the city’s increasingly troubled downtown business district, a cluster of towering high-rises emerges from the harbor like a defiant mountain range of concrete. A cobblestone boulevard leads to a European-style thoroughfare dotted with a dazzling array of upscale restaurants and outdoor dining patios.

State Senator Seeks To Unearth Hidden Costs Of Developer Tax Breaks

February 6, 2024 Taya Graham and Stephen Janis, The Real News Network. Educate! Accountability, Baltimore, Development, Tax Breaks, Transparency

For decades, Baltimore has doled out tax breaks intended to spur development. But the increasing use of incentives has not been matched by scrutiny of how much they cost the city, and who is benefiting. State Senator Jill Carter intends to correct that imbalance with a bill she has introduced to study a variety of tax breaks in-depth, with the purpose of determining if their use is both equitable and cost effective. “I think it’s important that people pay attention to how much money is thrown out to wealthy developers with no accountability,” Carter said. The bill would authorize a task force to gather data and recommend processes to increase transparency and accountability for how tax breaks are used.

Over Half Of 20 Top Public Charities Are Donor Advised Funds

September 10, 2023 Helen Flannery, Inequality.org. Educate! charities, Investments, Non-Profits, Tax Breaks

Last year, we wrote about how donor-advised funds, or DAFs, had become the top recipients of charitable giving in the United States. At the time, we were astounded to discover that DAF sponsors made up six of the top 10 and nine of the top 20 most successful public-charity fundraisers in the country. We’ve updated the data for 2021 — the most recent year for which complete data is available — and the picture has only gotten more stark. Donor-advised fund sponsors now make up seven of the top 10 and eleven of the top 20 public charities in the United States. Public charities are nonprofits that rely on a broad base of donors for their revenue.

Can We Move Beyond Philanthrocapitalism?

June 8, 2023 David Bollier. Educate! Capitalism, Philanthropy, Poverty, Tax Breaks

While the many philanthropies of the world address social injustice, gender discrimination, and countless other issues, there is one topic that is off-limits to most of them: changing the capitalist system itself, the source of many problems that philanthropy aspires to solve. This conundrum is the focus of a new book, Post Capitalist Philanthropy, by Alnoor Ladha and Lynn Murphy, which is a bold inquiry into what they call “philanthrocapitalism." As Ladha puts it, “A few people have amassed so much wealth that they're now determining the agenda for a civil society. Ostensibly, we're told that this is for social benefit, but actually they're getting huge amounts of tax breaks, social and political power, and undermining democracy itself.

The Ivory Tower Is Dead

November 30, 2021 Davarian L. Baldwin And Sam Klug, Dissent Magazine. Educate! Gentrification, Higher Education, Tax Breaks, Worker Rights

Davarian L. Baldwin’s recent book, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower, offers an insightful examination—and stirring critique—of the role of universities in the political economy of U.S. cities. In this interview, Baldwin shines a light on how institutions that define themselves as key contributors to the public good have entrenched new forms of urban inequality. Understanding the meaning of higher education in American life today requires seeing the university from the perspective of the workers it exploits, the residents it displaces, and the people it polices. Sam Klug: You claim that many major cities have not just embraced the eds and meds economy but have actually become company towns for large institutions of higher education—what you label “UniverCities.” How do universities exercise this kind of control?

55 Corporations Paid $0 In Federal Taxes On 2020 Profits

April 7, 2021 Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. Educate! Corporations, Tax Breaks, Taxes

At least 55 of the largest corporations in America paid no federal corporate income taxes in their most recent fiscal year despite enjoying substantial pretax profits in the United States. This continues a decades-long trend of corporate tax avoidance by the biggest U.S. corporations, and it appears to be the product of long-standing tax breaks preserved or expanded by the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) as well as the CARES Act tax breaks enacted in the spring of 2020. The tax-avoiding companies represent various industries and collectively enjoyed almost $40.5 billion in U.S. pretax income in 2020, according to their annual financial reports. The statutory federal tax rate for corporate profits is 21 percent. The 55 corporations would have paid a collective total of $8.5 billion for the year had they paid that rate on their 2020 income.

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