During the debate about how to resolve the fiscal cliff crisis, lawmakers on both sides have considered reducing the charitable tax deduction. That strikes many people as the wrong approach (especially those of us who work for non-profits!) even though we may not be able to explain why it’s such a bad idea.

Fortunately, John Carney has provided a superb explanation for why reducing or removing this deduction is counterproductive. For instance, changing the charitable deduction as Carney notes, has the same effect as another deduction that most of us didn’t even know exist: the deduction for volunteers.

Imagine that you serve a charity that pays you $15 a hour for your labor. Instead of cashing their checks, though, you immediately donate that money back to the charity. If this income was taxed and deduction was allowed, it would mean we were paying a tax on the time we volunteer to charities. But as Carney explains, this is the same thing as when we provide “free” labor to a charity. The income we forgo is equivalent to donated income.
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An interesting call for papers from H-Net, “Almshouses in Europe from the late Middle Ages to the Present – Comparisons and Peculiarities”:

Within the field of poor relief and welfare, research interests have recently shifted towards the history of private charity and charitable foundations. Among these institutions, which contributed to the early modern and modern mixed economy of welfare, the almshouse played an important role as a particular form of social housing. Almshouses originated in the Middle Ages and many of them still exist. They offered elderly people at risk of impoverishment cheap or free accommodation, often alongside clothing, food, fuel and money – the actual alms. Many were founded by private benefactors. Almshouses usually consisted of a limited number of small apartments for one or two persons. Unlike other welfare institutions in early modern Europe (hospitals, orphanages etc.) almshouse apartments allowed their occupants to run an autonomous household under respectable living conditions and considerable privacy.

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Barack Obama recently announced that he wishes to expand President Bush’s program of public funding for religious charities. In his latest piece for National Review Online Rev. Robert A. Sirico, president of the Acton Institute, warns us of some of the dangers of federal funding for faith-based charities.

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The 10 finalists for the Samaritan Award were announced last Thursday. This annual award was created by the Acton Institute to honor a highly successful, privately funded charity whose work is direct, personal, and accountable.

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The 2008 Samaritan Award opens today! If you know of a great charity or non-profit organization that directly serves members of a vulnerable population and receives little to no government funding, please encourage them to apply. The grand prize is $10,000 and there are several smaller awards for runners-up.

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A recent NYT article outlines some recent research showing that many people who give to charity “often tolerate high administrative costs, fail to monitor charities and do not insist on measurable results — the opposite of how they act when they invest in the stock market.” Tyler Cowen writes in “Investing in Good Deeds Without Checking the Prospectus,” about the research of John A. List, a professor at the University of Chicago, which “implies that most donors do not respond when they have opportunities to be more effective in their giving.”

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Joe Knippenberg, who blogs at No Left Turns, provides a thoughtful and engaging analysis of the particulars of the recent Iowa court decision finding against InnerChange Freedom Initiative, an outreach of Prison Fellowship Ministries. In “Penitents in the Penitentiary?,” at The American Enterprise Online, Knippenberg writes, “Despite my general support for the faith-based initiative, and for religious efforts to put the penitence back in penitentiaries, I’m inclined for the most part to agree with Judge Pratt. In this particular case, where the state and Prison Fellowship self-consciously tested the outer bounds of current church-state jurisprudence, they went too far.”

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Where will they go?

Churches and religious relief organizations are playing a much more active role in U.S. foreign policy. And that has been obvious in recent months in the recovery efforts for the South Asian tsunami and the Pakistan earthquakes.

Read more on ‘Overwhelmed by Orphans’…

According to The Church Report, a new resource has been released which offers churches guidelines for keeping their activities and functions within the letter of the law. As non-profit organizations, churches are held to the same standard as registered charities and cannot engage in certain forms of public speech.

Read more on Politics and the Pulpit…