Curt Weeden, a veteran corporate grant maker, marked the first anniversary of Donald Trump’s election by thinking about what he might say about a group of nonprofits. Here’s his take:
This I can tell you — there are a million nonprofits in this country. A million! And here’s the thing, folks, a lot of the nonprofits do what the government does. Except most of the time, they do it better and cheaper.
That’s why I love nonprofits. Great organizations. Great people running them. Great, great people.
I tell nonprofits we’re going to spend more on the military. You know what they say? Some of them, most of them? Good! They think it’s fantastic we’re putting our military first. We have to, folks. We have no choice.
More money for the military means less money for other things. Makes sense, right? So, we’re going to cut back on programs like the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and community-development block grants.
You know what the fake media will say about these cuts? You know, right? The arts are finished! The environment will be a disaster! People are going to starve! But that’s not going to happen. Believe me. Because for every dollar we cut from the budget, there’s a nonprofit organization ready to step in and take over.
I hear from nonprofits all the time. They love me — love what I’m doing. They tell me they’ll pick up whatever we cut from the government budget. But they also say they’re worried about our terrific plan to reform the tax code. Why? Because it might make it harder for them to raise money to run their programs.
Nonprofits want to make paying taxes simpler — that I can tell you. Everyone wants that, folks. But my friends who run nonprofits — by the way, they are great people — they say before we put the final touches on a tax plan that’s going to be really terrific for the middle class, we should do three things.
First, we should add something to our tax plan. It’s called a universal charitable deduction. The way it works is you get a tax deduction for a donation you make to a charity no matter what. Even if you take the fantastic new standard deduction that’s in our plan, you can still take another deduction for a donation you make to a church, school, or the NRA Foundation.
Second, they want to make sure we keep a special deduction for businesses. It’s called the “enhanced tax deduction for the charitable donation of inventory.” What the hell is that? Nobody ever knew it was in the tax code to begin with. But what it means is that businesses, farmers, restaurants all get an extra tax deduction when they donate products to nonprofits. We’re talking about hundreds of millions — even billions — of dollars of write-offs, folks.
Third, and I told them this one could be a big problem — they want to keep the estate tax. I call it the death tax. Nonprofits like to call it “a-reason-to-give” tax. Whatever. The point is they don’t want it to disappear in six years, which is what’s on the table right now. What they tell me is people give to charity to avoid paying 40 percent of their estate to the government. It’s a big incentive, folks. Nonprofits get 8 percent of all their gifts from bequests. That’s a lot. I understand that.
So I tell nonprofits we’ll run the numbers. And we will. But this I can tell you, folks. It’s going to be hard for these organizations to negotiate a deal. Getting us to make changes in our great, great plan to cut taxes will be very tough. And here’s why: It doesn’t matter how we change the tax code or cut nonmilitary spending. We know nonprofits are going to backstop us. They always do. They always find a way.
We love nonprofit organizations. They’re making America great again, folks. That I can tell you. Believe me.
Curt Weeden, who has overseen corporate contributions at Johnson and Johnson and founded the Association of Corporate Contributions Professionals, is co-director of Georgetown University’s New Strategies program, which works with nonprofit executives to expand their organizations’ revenue sources.