Tag Archives: Donations

Commentary

Rich Wall Street donors abandoning Democrats

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Story here in the leftist Washington Post. (H/T Wes Widner, ECM)

Excerpt:

A revolt among big donors on Wall Street is hurting fundraising for the Democrats’ two congressional campaign committees, with contributions from the world’s financial capital down 65 percent from two years ago.

[…]In reviewing the FEC records, The Post analyzed fundraising data for New York City and its suburbs in New Jersey, on Long Island and north of the city — a region that had become an outsized source of Democratic campaign cash. In the 2008 cycle, 28 percent of the two committees’ itemized individual contributions came from the region. Manhattan alone accounted for 20 percent.

In this election cycle, the percentage raised in New York is less than 10 percent of the total.

More than 600 regular donors from the New York area — whose four- and five-figure checks added up to $10 million for the DSCC and DCCC in 2006 and 2008 — have so far abandoned their effort to retain the Democratic majorities.

Take Jamie Dimon, the head of J.P. Morgan Chase, who is known for his close relationship with President Obama.

In 2006 and 2008, he donated $65,000 to the Democratic committees. This election cycle, he has not contributed at all to the DSCC or DCCC. At the end of March, however, he gave $2,000 to the campaign of Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), who is seeking to claim Obama’s former Senate seat. A spokeswoman for Dimon noted that he has given to individual Democratic candidates, just not to the campaign committees.

Other prominent Democratic donors who have not given to the Democrats this year include Leon Black, a co-founder of the $53 billion New York-based Apollo Global Management a private-equity firm, and his wife, Debra Black. The couple gave more than $200,000 to Democratic congressional committees over the previous two election cycles but have not given this year, according to the latest disclosure documents. A spokesman for Apollo declined to comment.

Lloyd Blankfein, chief executive and chairman of Goldman Sachs, has not donated to the Democrats, either, after giving $50,000 in the previous two cycles. A company spokesman declined to comment.

The problem has been particularly acute for Senate Democrats, whose previous DSCC chairman, Sen. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.), had strong connections to Wall Street.

Wow, bet you never knew that big Wall Street bankers were all Democrats, did you?

News

Obama budget proposal likely to decrease charitable giving by billions

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Story here from Newsbusters.

Excerpt:

On the April 16 broadcast of Fox Business Network’s “Varney & Co.,” Rick Dunham, CEO of fundraising consultant Dunham & Company, weighed in on the new budget proposal that would scale back charitable deductions for families making over $250,000.

“Do you think you’re going to take a really big hit in terms of lower donations to charities? How big a hit?” host Stuart Varney asked.

“Well the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University did a study last year to look at the impact of the rise in the marginal tax rate and the capping of charitable deductions at 28-percent and they believe that it’ll be about almost a $4 billion hit based on 2006 dollars,” Dunham said. “So we’re probably looking at about a $5 billion hit.”

“That’s a sizable chunk of money,” Varney said. “There has been some talk that the administration wants to control charitable giving, and direct where your charitable gifts should go, therefore do it through the government and not through private charities. You think there’s anything to that?”

Dunham didn’t reject the idea out of hand. “I think all the actions kind of lead that direction. Part of the challenge charities are facing right now is they’re coming off of two years of a decline in giving to charities,” Dunham stated, citing the approximate $12 billion decrease in charitable giving the last two years.

“The government has always encouraged it through the tax incentive. And I think that’s been a huge part of giving in America – that the government has stood behind private philanthropy by saying ‘we want you to invest in charitable institutions for the good they do to our society.’ And I think that’s what they’re beginning to undermine.”

This is similar to what happened in Europe. As the secular leftists welfare states grew, people paid more and more in taxes. People had no money after the high taxes to give to charity, because they had “already given” to state. It was the state’s job to take care of people, not private charities. People became very selfish and hedonistic, and religious practice and charitable giving declined.

The problem with this for Christians is that the state never uses tax money to achieve Christian goals. With a Christian charity, the goal is usually to give the person with money, but also to help the person up and out of their current situation. Christians aren’t trying to give a man a fish, they want to teach him how to fish. It also helps to feel a little humble when someone is helping you.

Commentary

How the siege mentality of Christians hurts us all

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Here is a profile of the undisputed champion of gay rights activism, Tim Gill. (H/T Jennifer Roback Morse)

Read the article, and then answer this question: where is our Tim Gill? Why are we raising the next generation of Christians to build higher and better walls between faith and knowledge?

Excerpt from the article:

Tim Gill is best known as the founder of the publishing-software giant Quark Inc., and for a long time was one of the few openly gay members of the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans. He was born in 1953 to one of Colorado’s well-known Republican political families. (The town of Gill in the north-central part of the state is named after them.) After earning a degree in applied mathematics and computer science from the University of Colorado at Boulder, Gill founded Quark in his apartment in 1981, in the manner of other self-made computer magnates like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, with a $2,000 loan from his parents.

[…]In 2000, he sold his interest in Quark for a reported half-billion dollars in order to focus full-time on his philanthropy.

Even as he has shied from the spotlight, Gill has become one of the most generous and widest-reaching political benefactors in the country, and emblematic of a new breed of business-minded donor that is rapidly changing American politics. A surge of new wealth has created a generation of givers eager to influence politics but barred from the traditional channels of participation by recent campaign-finance laws designed to limit large gifts to candidates and political parties. Like Gill, many of these figures are entrepreneurs who have made fortunes in technology.

[…]Gill’s principal interest is gay equality. His foundations have given about $115 million to charities. His serious involvement in politics is a more recent development, though geared toward the same goal. In 2000, he gave $300,000 in political donations, which grew to $800,000 in 2002, $5 million in 2004, and a staggering $15 million last year, almost all of it to state and local campaigns.

Not everyone has to be like Tim Gill, be we all have to try to have an influence in the most effective way possible. And that means being realistic about what it takes to have an influence. Some things just don’t work.