News Nov 19, 2009 at 4:00 am

The $50 Tax Loophole for the Poor and Infamous

Comments

1
Where is the PAC to fight the homophobes who want to recall the Mayor?
2
It is www.basicrights.org

If you leave off the www, it doesn't go anywhere. I'll give them money in the hope that they'll find a webmaster that can fix that, since some people (including some newspaper reporters,) tend to be lazy about actually typing that bit in.

However, in the meantime, the Mercury should fix the online article so that it points at the real website.

Also: Make sure you are contributing the money to the right place for your goals.
1) If you contribute money to BRO directly, it doesn't count towards the $50 state tax credit, it doesn't count as anything, except that BRO has the money and you don't. I mean, BRO is a great organization so that is good too, but if you were doing this to lower your taxes, that won't.
2) The Basic Rights Education Fund is a 501c3 organization which is run by BRO, and so counts as a charity, which means it is deductible from your income, which lowers your (state&federal) taxes by 25% or whatever bracket you are in. There isn't a limit, (beyond lowering your taxes to zero,) on how much you can contribute, so if you want to reduce your taxes by $1000, you can give them $4000, (or whatever bracket you are in.)
3) Basic Rights Equality PAC and Basic Rights Measure PAC mainly do lobbying and so they both qualify for the $50 tax credit.

(I gave someone the $50 back in March. He'd lost a close race, and the winner was saying very dumb things in the press, so even though he isn't in my district I gave him money. Or more accurately, I decided that he should have the money instead of the state legislator, who had the very dumb things guy in it.)
3
It would have been nice to know how much money this works out as being out of state tax revenue. Does the Mercury know how to access this information? I believe that Novick was trying to get rid of this because he saw this as a tax credit for higher income earners, although, in a way, it does foster more of a political discourse in this state. Thoughts, Mercury? It would have been nice to have seen this article a little bit more fleshed out with different insights into the actual existence of this tax credit.

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