Techies, Pay Your Damn Taxes!

Alessandra Stanley (“Silicon Valley’s New Philanthropy,” NYT 10/30/2015) is brave to take on the giving practices of the new tech multi-millionaires. How can one be critical of the young men (mostly) who have so much money and so much faith in their own technology and innovation that they believe the most effective good can be accomplished if it is guided by themselves? One can hardly argue with the successes of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

But, of course, this is not selfless philanthrophy. However grand, however successful, it is philanthropy as deduction.

Stanley points out the these philanthropists do not argue for institutional change that might address their concerns and none has less interest than higher taxation of the rich. They offer, instead, to fix some of those problems excerbated by lack of money, even if increased tax revenues could fix them without their help.

Since 1913, with the institution of the personal income tax, philanthropy has been a strategy for avoiding taxes as well as promoting causes close to the donors’ heart. Not so incidentally, philanthrophy can provide fame and notions of legacy. Individual names dot university buildings, keeping the donors’ names alive generation after generation, even if the truth is the donation that engineered the “naming opportunity” was not really a donation at all, but a diversion of a tax responsibility. A deal indeed. Tax avoidance and gratitude.

For the tech entrepreneurs the pot can be made even sweeter when the donations of technology products go to schools and faraway places where they help build the future user.

And then there is hubris. Young men of good fortune equipped with sets of beliefs that have apparently paid off can only believe that they know what to do with their money better than, certainly, the government does. This is an anti-government stand that we see in less enlightened areas than the Bay Area where most of the entrepreneurs are located. In this regard, the tech entrepreneurs might be surprised at how much they have in common with the most conservative parts of the nation, even if they do wear tee shirts and sneakers to work.

Who is to pay for the responsibilities that government has to its citizens when the well-to-do, including this cohort, not only pay a lower percentage of taxes than, as we all know, Warren Buffet now-famous secretary? Since the evisceration of the middle class, the folks who routinely paid their taxes regularly and honestly, and the rise of tax strategies among those who are flourishing, where is the money to come from?

The ending tax base has especially hurt local municipalities. Whatever the anti-government, nay-sayers think, not all taxes go to waste Roads, schools and infrastructure are suffering because the tax base can’t cover what it should. In my special area of the Bay Area, the county struggles to pave roads necessary for visitor use, but a block or two off the ribboned highways are rutted and dangerous streets accompanied by the down-market housing that such neglect engenders. Our local school system is happy to receive donations from a local thrift shop! A thrift shop for God’s sake, hardly a repository of big money.

How much better if the schools were well funded from a ongoing tax base. The tech philanthropists who are generous to some schools but no to others should consider that all schools could be benefitted if their fully-paid taxes went to the support the entire school system.

Moreover, I do not want to live in a country where our day-to-day functioning depends on largesse of the well-do-do, or have entrepreneurs make decisions that best should be made from people we have elected.

Techies, pay your taxes without the donation write off. Make whatever donations you want after you’ve paid them. Just give money to good causes out of your own pockets without any expectations except for doing a good thing!

Patricia Bradley

Sonoma, CA.