Even before Republican congressional leaders hammered out final details of a tax overhaul, they announced a new campaign to cut vital safety-net programs.
They said their move was prompted by concern about the gaping federal deficit — the very one they just ballooned by over a trillion dollars with a tax giveaway to the wealthiest Americans. This perfidious indecency means that if the tax overhaul passes, the richest 1 percent of taxpayers would receive over 60 percent of the cuts while people who depend on Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs that benefit the middle class and poor would lose ground. Even the elderly and the ill already hurt by these tax changes, and those whose futures depend on Social Security, are likely to be further sacrificed in this process.
With so much at stake for nonprofits and the people they serve, charities — and even more critically foundations — must learn why they failed in the tax battle and act now to better prepare themselves to represent the public interest in advance of the 2018 mid-term elections and long beyond.
To succeed, three things must happen fast:
- Charities and foundations must help the public understand policy issues for what they really are.
- Nonprofits must invigorate enlightened grass-roots participation in the democratic process and make that a key act for charities and their donors and volunteers.
- Foundations must overcome both their arrogance and their self-serving timidity to recognize that no matter what their mission, they cannot succeed without fueling substantial nonprofit work to repair and strengthen our fractured democracy.
Indeed, to succeed, nonprofits and foundations must be willing to talk about power and work to build it through democratic action.
Educate the Public About What Congress Is Doing
First, on the issues: Let’s start with taxes.
Although President Trump and other Republicans have insisted that their proposed tax cuts are designed to benefit the middle class, it has become profoundly clear that they principally benefit their wealthy cronies and benefactors. By the end of the 10-year life of the tax measure, every American with an income of under $75,000 would see a tax increase. Even before then, people who earn their money through wages would pay higher taxes on the same amount of income than those privileged enough to set themselves up as corporations or independent contractors or use similar schemes.
Early on, some political observers labeled what we are seeing as “class warfare.”
More recently, some Republicans seem to acknowledge that: Powerful Sen. Chuck Grassley, the Iowa Republican, defended the estate-tax cuts — benefiting the top one-fifth of 1 percent of Americans — by saying that he wanted to reward investors “as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies.”
Rep. Mark Sanford, Republican of South Carolina, said: “From a truth-in-advertising standpoint, it would have been a lot simpler if we just acknowledged reality on this bill, which is it’s fundamentally a corporate tax reduction and restructuring bill, period.”
And now, under the leadership of House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, these same Republicans are using the deficit created by their efforts to benefit the wealthy as a reason to eviscerate programs critical to those who aren’t rich.
Sen. Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican, claims budget cuts are necessary “because we don’t have money anymore” and finds that he has “a rough time wanting to spend billions and billions and trillions of dollars to help people who won’t help themselves, won’t lift a finger and expect the federal government to do everything,” although he does seem to think that there are still some deserving poor.
Thus, the issue is clear: The current tax battle is not about helping the middle class or those in poverty; it is about a massive transfer of even more money into the pockets of the already rich. As also is clear, the next battle, the Republicans’ new assault on government programs for the rest of Americans, is about exactly the same thing — and charities and foundations must fight mightily to help the public understand this.
Help Ordinary People Influence Public Policy
Second, if charities are to be effective in fighting these battles and myriad others to protect people and the planet, they must acknowledge that it takes power to affect policy. And power is stacked against them because of the very ways in which it is most easily gained and applied — through targeted campaign contributions controlled and directed by lobbyists.
Given the makeup of the Supreme Court, it is unlikely that there will be effective campaign-finance overhaul anytime soon. That means that lobbyists for charities — the people who advocate on behalf of the public interest — will never be on an even playing field with deep-pocketed campaign-contributing private and corporate interests. And that means that the only way for charities and the public to win is to change the way the game is played.
Thankfully, we live in a democracy, and though it may sound anachronistic, ordinary people can gain power. They can bend policy toward the public interest if they are helped to do so in ways organized and promoted by charities and foundations.
But to help overburdened charities take on such additional work will require leadership from the associations of nonprofits and foundations that work nationally and in regions and localities across the country — and such leadership currently seems very rare. For instance, instead of quixotic narrow advocacy to extend the charitable deduction to everyone, even those who don’t itemize on their tax returns, Independent Sector, the Council on Foundations, and other similar groups — as well as grant-maker affinity groups and nonprofit associations focused on specific missions — should have rallied around the broader public interest in the tax debates. And instead of relying on lobbyists and elite campaigns to promote their cause, they need to commit to the hard work of organizing people for energized participation in the democratic process.
Nonprofit organizations employ more than 11 million people, and each year they are augmented by more than another 63 million volunteers and still millions more who are simply donors. And those numbers pale in comparison with the legions of people and communities directly served by charities, who participate in their public programs, or who are in constituencies and among those who care about the causes and interests for which charities work.
Even without appeals to the broader public, that is a huge universe of people allied with charities who can become more engaged in democratic processes to represent the mission and interests that attracted them to nonprofit organizations. Well-designed and well-funded efforts to help those people to better understand what’s at stake with public-policy issues, to know and feel what charities know and feel about threats to the public interest, would be a great start in building a powerful army of informed and electrified voters.
But it takes organizing to build, sustain, and keep active such networks of democratically engaged people through charities at the local level, and that takes leadership from national and other groups that focus on specific missions and those that represent civil society more broadly. And that takes money.
Support Democracy
To the third point, most foundations seem either to think they know what public policy ought to be on a particular issue or institution and go about arrogantly trying to buy it through concerted grant making, or they seem to fear engagement with policy at all and want to assiduously avoid anything that might seem political or counter to the moneyed interests of their own board members and founding families.
What seems to be missing in all but the fewest philanthropies is support for democratic institutions and people’s engagement to build public-policy power — such activities draw well under 2 percent of U.S. foundations’ grant funding, as Gary Bass, executive director of the Bauman Foundation, and I discussed previously in The Chronicle’s opinion section.
President Obama recently noted that given its fragility and reversibility, “we have to tend to this garden of democracy or else things could fall apart quickly,” as they did in Nazi Germany. “So, you’ve got to pay attention. And vote.”
And that’s the only route to real power for charities in these public-policy debates: They must engage and stimulate broad-based participation in the democratic process, and that means nonprofits getting people to vote.
This cannot be done without significantly increased foundation support for democratic organizing — and grant makers truly are wise enough to know that. Thus, their failure to act, their refusal to support direct action to save America as we know it, can represent nothing but complicity with those who would sacrifice everyone and everything in service to the obscenely wealthy.
Mark Rosenman is a professor emeritus at Union Institute & University and a veteran nonprofit activist.