Limits on Charitable Deductions Lifted This Year

Congress has lifted some limits on how much you can deduct your charitable contributions from your taxes this year, when those contributions are made to hurricane relief efforts.

This may allow you to greatly reduce or even eliminate your federal income tax by making large donations to such charities, something that is not usually easy to do.

Ordinarily, the law limits how much of your charitable donations you can deduct to a percentage of your Adjusted Gross Income (20%, 30%, or 50% depending on the nature of the donation). Also, this deduction is an “itemized” deduction, and is subject to limits on how much of such deductions you can take. The new law removes those two limits for certain types of charitable donations.

To qualify for the provisions of this new law, the donations must be made between 23 August and 31 December 2017 to an organization involved in hurricane relief efforts in the disaster areas proclaimed in response to hurricanes Harvey, Irma, or Maria.

More tax resistance news:

• On the NWTRCC blog, Erica Leigh writes about how the U.S. crackdown on refugees and immigrants “is just an extension of U.S. war — it’s not a stretch to say so and we ought to point it out at every opportunity.” NWTRCC has at times been uncomfortable supporting resisters whose complaints about violent government extend beyond war, the focus of its pacifist core, but it seems to be becoming more willing to consider some of these issues as being valid extensions of war tax resistance.
• Manufacturers of hand-woven textiles in India have started a “tax denial satyagraha” — refusing to collect the Goods and Services Tax which is newly being applied to such goods. The government has responded by closing its yarn monopoly to manufacturers who have refused to register to pay the tax.

  Abhilash C A, convener of Graama Seva Sangha, described the “tax denial satyagraha” as civil disobedience. “It will be the first civil disobedience movement after Mahatma Gandhi’s satyagraha. People across India will sell khadi and handloom fabrics and handmade leather goods and without charging GST,” said Abhilash.

• Calling government corruption a “hydra-headed monster,” judge Arun Chaudhari of the Nagpur bench of Bombay High Court advised citizens to launch a tax refusal campaign. “The miasma of corruption can be beaten if all work together. If it continues, taxpayers should refuse to pay taxes through a non-cooperation movement.”
• The Kasai-Oriental province chapter of the Union for Democracy and Social Progress, one of the largest political parties in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, declared a tax strike this month.

  Taxes and duties contribute to the development and welfare of the general citizenry. This is not the case in the DRC, where taxes and duties go essentially to the enrichment of a clique, to the detriment of the national community which is subject to miseries of all kinds.… So I ask the Congolese people in general, and those of Kasai in particular, not to pay taxes from October 1 until the departure of the current administration. The call to disobedience is for us a means to defeat the power of [Congo president Joseph] Kabila.

  Kabila’s official term as president ended last year, but he refused to step down and the government has refused to hold new elections. Opposition groups vowed in July to begin a tax strike this month, among other actions, if the government refused to begin to implement an election by then.
• The consumer credit reporting agency Equifax leaked identifying data about hundreds of millions of Americans to unknown cybercriminals. The intentions of the data-thieves are unknown, but such data would make it very easy to file phony tax returns for people in order to leach refunds from the IRS.
• One tax resistance tactic is to increase the salience of taxation: that is, to make people more aware of how much taxes are costing them as a way of increasing opposition to those taxes. The John Fielding pub in Cwmbran, Wales, is cutting its prices across the board by 7.5% for a month to show how much consumers would save if the value-added tax applied to food and drink at pubs were equal to that applied to food retailers like supermarkets. The pub is joining Wetherspoon’s, a chain of pubs across Britain, which is doing a similar one-day action: National Tax Equality Day.