PREVIEW

Writing Off Ideas: Taxation, Foundations, and Philanthropy in America (Book/ Paperback)

Product Overview

Throughout the twentieth century, non-profit foundations grew tremendously and changed their orientation substantially. Early in the century, large private foundations, created by the wealth of entrepreneurs such as Rockefeller, Ford, Mellon, and Carnegie, directed their resources toward projects that could show tangible benefits, such as curing diseases, building libraries, and endowing educational institutions. Although foundations still devote considerable resources to these causes, increasingly they are funding programs oriented towards evaluating and changing government policy. Issues of international affairs, educational policy, and social and economic policy more generally have received substantial funding from private foundations. WRITING OFF IDEAS surveys the history and present status of foundations–focusing on the ideas they promote and their influence on political and cultural society. The history of foundations raises a number of questions of public policy that WRITING OFF IDEAS examines in detail.

The tax system gives highly preferential treatment to foundations. Are such benefits justified?

Who monitors private foundations and to whom are they accountable?

Should private foundations live forever?

Is greater government oversight of foundations warranted or would such policies be injurious to the public welfare?

Old Money or “Soft Money”?

Of the many examples of politicized philanthropy, the Ford Foundation has been among the most politically-oriented of all foundations. In the 1960s, for example, the Foundation supported the Mexican American Youth Organization (MAYO) which was dedicated to furthering the welfare of Hispanics by supporting socialism. Members of MAYO frequently visited Cuba and disseminated pro-Castro propaganda to Mexican-Americans. And in 1967, the foundation worked with the then left-liberal Congress of Racial Equality to undertake a voter registration drive in the predominantly black areas of Cleveland, Ohio, when Carl Stokes, a black candidate for mayor, was running against white candidate Seth Taft. Following the registration drive, Stokes was elected. The foundation claimed that the registration drive was aimed at increasing “democratic participation,” evading the fact that the drive was actually a deliberate program in campaign politics, in this case targeting African-Americans to support expanded government policies.

More recent examples of donations with political ramifications include the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s donation of $30 million to fund anti-tobacco and anti-drug media campaigns supporting government programs, the Florence and John Schumann Foundation’s $5 million donation to establish a national organization to advance public participation in campaign finance reform and the Lannan Foundation’s $2.6 million donation to support the separatist Independent Traditional Seminole Nation.

Although private foundation giving has traditionally favored “liberal” causes, a number of influential “conservative” programs have increasingly been funded by foundations. Charles Murray’s 1984 book, Losing Ground, for example marshaled an impressive array of statistics to argue that government welfare programs were making the poor worse off by creating incentives for recipients to stay single, have children, and not save for the future. At the time, Murray’s book was highly controversial and widely criticized, but there is little doubt that it profoundly changed the nature of the welfare debate. As Murray relates in the preface to Losing Ground, “the Manhattan Institute took a chance and decided to use the foundation’s resources to underwrite the effort. Without them, the book would not have been written.” Subsequently, Murray took the position of Bradley Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, which is part of a network of organizations funded by private, conservative foundations. While there, he co-authored with the late Harvard professor Richard Herrnstein, another contro

About the Author(s)