When I was doing my taxes a few weeks back, I had to look up the IRS rules to figure out how to deduct some donations I had made. The information is available at http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p526.pdf
I got my answer. On the way through this overly long document, I learned far more about Government policy to dead, stuffed animals than I cared to. I learned that:
If you donate taxidermy property to a qualified organization, your deduction is limited to your basis in the property or its fair market value, whichever is less. This applies if you prepared,stuffed, or mounted the property or paid or in-curred the cost of preparing, stuffing, or mount-ing the property.
Desrcibing determining basis:
It also does not include direct or indirect costs for hunting or killing an animal, such as equipment costs and the costs of preparing an animal carcass for taxidermy.
And I also learned that:
Taxidermy property means any work of art that:
- Is the reproduction or preservation of an animal, in whole or in part,
- Is prepared, stuffed, or mounted to re-create one or more characteristics of the animal, and
- Contains a part of the body of the dead animal.
No wonder CPA’s make 6 figures if even taxidermy donations are this complicated! This is the type of thing that could drive me to become a Libertarian.
in 4-10-2008 @ 13:40:45
There is no doubt that tax policy has grown complex and unwieldy to the point of absurdity. To my way of seeing it, this is a large part of the Libertarian viewpoint, as you imply: “if it has to be this complicated, then clearly we’d be better off without it entirely.” It is an emotionally, if not rationally, understandable viewpoint.
However, that does not mean that taxation in and of itself is a bad thing. What the Libertarian viewpoint fails to do is two-fold. First, it fails to separate the symptom of crazy tax rules and regulation from the underlying concept of taxes. The two are most definitely not inextricable from one another. I doubt you’ll get much argument from anybody that the two should, in fact, be extricated from one another post haste!
Second, the Libertarian viewpoint, by casting the role of government as an entity whose sole purpose is to burden society with crazy tax rules and other limitations on personal freedom, fails to recognize that it is tax revenue which supports the very necessary infrastructure on which our society exists. It fails to recognize that together, by each pitching in a bit of money, we can collectively buy assets that are a) incredibly useful and valuable, and b) significantly more expensive than any of us could ever buy on our own. Roads. Clean city drinking water systems. Police. Fire protection. Municipal waste water treatment.
It’s a long list, and together it’s the infrastructure of our comfortable, safe, first-world lives that none of us would really choose to do without. There’s a reason so many states have the word “commonwealth” as part of their names–because together, via taxation that is responsibly managed and spent for the good of all, we can build a “common wealth” that is greater than what we could each achieve on our own.
Libertarianism tends to focus on the problems of implementation (of which there are indisputably many) to the exclusion of the hugely positive end goal. The rational response is to focus on fixing the implementation, not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.