Trade and Other Tax Exempt Organizations

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Lee Hustead

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Oct 2, 2014, 6:07:45 PM10/2/14

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For Walt Kloefkorn re Trade Associations — You did a yeoman's job with your reference material. Thank you much. It has taken most of my free time for many days just to read it. However it overwhelms me. The situation is worse than I imagined. It makes me think we should amend our constitution to require a constitutional convention every 25 years or so because this (and the present supreme court) seem to be evils that can’t otherwise be fought. I am not against losing a specific cause if it would help the overall cause, gain membership, etc. But this has a set of problems that would require enormous commitment for years. It seems to me that the only solution would be to totally eliminate tax free entities. Pick any one of the 37 different tax exemption types and you would be playing favorites and all the rest would resist anyway. And broad brush you would be up against, unions, churches, religion in general, health organizations, philanthropy in general, probably somehow also against motherhood and in favor of sin.

Most of the “How to Criticize” and “Got Dough” is concerned with philanthropy that is presumably in support of better schools, and 90% of it is validly (in my opinion) critical of that philanthropy. Those same criticisms, IN SPADES, could be directed at the other 37 varieties of tax exempt organiztions — particularly the trade organizations. In case you did not pick up on it the Josse-Bass Handbook claims that by 1980 the IRS listed 320,000 charitable tax exempts, 336,000 religious bodies, and 526,000 non-charitable tax exempts, and a grand total (in 1980) of over 1.5 million tax exempt entities.

For the benefit of others who may be inclined to read the material posted by Walt I suggest the following sequence — first read the first few pages (its 38 pages total) of the “Historical Perspectives”, 2nd - How to Criticize, and 3rd - Got Dough. Every progressive should read this material. However I think PDA would benefit more from your work in other areas.