Tax-deductible support of local news is a fantastic idea.
Suspiciously they made near zero profit the next year.
I have no issue with local papers going non profit, however the idea they can do it any not cross into the political side is going to be a stretch. either from the weight given to certain stories, selection of letters to editors, down to opinion pieces, there are many ways to skirt the rules
Creating yet more loopholes doesn't sound like a good idea.
It's more like a government-led incentive scheme to support.
A contrasting system: once I bought a T-shirt at a general store in Scotland and having paid the shopkeeper said genially "you won't be needing that any more" and snipped a small cloth loop from between the shoulders, explaining that in doing so he had converted it from a child's pinafore (VAT rate 0%) to a man's T-shirt (17.5% at the time). I want to live in a country where all children are adequately clothed but it seems to me simpler to fund that directly, e.g. via a benefit for those with dependent children, possibly income-tested. If the concern is that the "feckless poor" will just waste the money then I'd question (a) whether this popular demon is actually so common and (b) whether such people switch from proper parenting to wastreldom on the basis of a one-fifth price increase.
The 'opposite side' of that is also true:
I'd rather see a carbon tax than eg photovoltaic subsidies.
The latter requires picking winners, and the recipients need to interact with bureaucracy to claim. The former rewards simply consuming less just as much as eg switching to renewables; and you don't need a lawyer to claim your (relative) rewards of lower taxes.
1: https://www.npr.org/2019/10/29/774494691/episode-949-the-pig...
"[A]mount of CO2 spared compared to the average" seems to be hard to define: if I burn lots of natural gas to create electricity, I release less natural gas than if I burn coal. But I release more than if I had managed to make do without that electricity.
But yes, a carbon tax is exactly that: if you pay your tax, releasing CO2 is legally and morally fine.
There's a certain amount that we can safely release. (That amount is smaller than what we release today.) The climate doesn't care about who's releasing CO2. So we use willingness to pay taxes to ration out that limited supply of allowable CO2 emissions.
Eg your fear seems to be that rich people can just buy indulgences and keep sinning, instead of having to repent? I say compared to giving every person an equal share of allowable emissions directly, I'm happy to personally emit a bit less, and have some ultra rich person indulge in return for them paying crazy amounts of taxes. I don't care about their moral fibre as long as they pay up.
If too many people decide to just pay the tax instead of cut their emissions, we'd need to adjust the tax rate. Because of inflation, population growth, advances of science etc, we would want to revise the tax rate every once in a while anyway.
(A cap-and-trade system would do that adjustment of the price automatically, but it seems that in practice it's hard for politicians to refrain from handing out permits for free and handing out too many. Eg the EU system would have worked better, if all permits would have been auctioned off by the government instead of being handed out to previous polluters for free.)
I strongly oppose income/means testing for many reasons: weird unintended consequences at edge cases and extra hoops to jump through. I'd much rather we all pay more in taxes to pay for everyone without means testing.
So it doesn't really matter whether we means test taxes only, or whether we also means test cash benefits. The former is simpler, as you suggest.
You can make the latter work without weird edge cases; but it's more work to keep everything consistent.
(Income tax is paid as a function of income. In that sense, it's already means tested. For the argument I am making is doesn't matter whether that function is linear or convex, ie whether we have a 'flat' income tax or a progressive one.
A tax that's fixed per head would not count as means tested.
Whether you'd want to call a sales tax means tested is debatable. Your absolute sales tax burden goes up with your consumption, but not directly with your income.)
Another example I came across recently was a corporate tax break for funding vocational education. The rationale being that the corporate looking to maximise their gains would sponsor graduates that could work for them, indirectly aligning curriculums with industry and increasing graduate employment rates.
Local news is dying/dead in many regions, yet it is essential for the functioning of democracy. Asking people to make informed decisions without reliable reporting works about as well as a thermostat without a thermometer, i. e. it doesn't.
Since everyone profits when others make better decisions at the voting booth, there is a direct argument to be made that the benefit of people subscribing to a local paper goes not to them, but their community, especially since important stories also tend to reach non-subscribers.
Assuming one agrees with that point and isn't part of the all-journalists-are-corrupt-marxist-crowd (or the alternative some-blogger-can-do-it-better-crowd), one would want to find ways to support local news. But direct subsidies run into obvious problems.
Reducing taxes would then be an obvious way to allow journalism to function: Its benefit is proportional to revenue and therefore preserves the market mechanisms.
Books and newspapers actually are exempt/partially exempt from VAT in many countries. But VAT just isn't a relevant factor in most of the US.
You can consider this "just a loophole" in the way that "don't put arsenic on pizza" is "just another regulation".
Any reduction of taxes on a special category means a relatively heavier tax burden on other necessities. Like tampons. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tampon_tax for equivalent outrage.
Btw, I'm all in favour of allowing people to put arsenic on pizza, as long as its clearly labelled.
For example, according to Patch (which is not nonprofit) this morning, if I exclude the vast amount of advertising and pathological fake news and focus on actual local coverage, in my hometown the local electronics recycling program is temporarily moving because of road construction, and three miles across town the police have reported three recent delivery package thefts.
How would either story influence me being more or less likely to vote for Trump in 2020?
There's been an intense cultural shift towards not making informed decisions in the voting booth; one MUST either vote along demographic identity lines or optionally follow groupthink or keep very, very quiet lest suffer possibly violent consequences. If those cultural trends change, then there would be motivation for informed voting. However, "everyone in charge" at this time likes the system and its a disinformation to pretend informed voting is relevant at this time. The problem at this time isn't "voter education" but "conform to your group or be punished".
>There's been an intense cultural shift towards not making informed decisions in the voting booth; [...]
These latter points ring with me, and I think bolster the argument that higher quality local news will aid our democracy.
Currently, if you scope out the national press, you get a national point of view. Without reporters writing about the affect that the national story will have on the local economy (aka "Me", "Our Community", "Our schools") voters can only be informed on one level.
When the air qualify affects your neighbors due to reduced EPA mandates, or school taxes go up because federal dollars evaporate, or kids are learning to check boxes in standardized tests, or the local banks get bought and sold to multinationals, and everyone mortgage is underwater along with the back yard, I think I might see a lot more value the work of a local reporter making local connections to these national ideas.
A robot can post about the reycling on patch, but can that robot also mention that a federal mandate makes the import tariff on transistors a little higher, and that Genui-Sys Integrations is gonna be underwater on its ECU contract, so possibly Billy's dad will face the pink slip?
Real Example: I didn't know that GM was contracting some electronics manufacturing to a pick and place shop floor in my county until I saw the shutters and asked around: "Hey what did that company even make? Bad market or what?" They made car parts.
It can be very helpful for informing about local candidates. Even the nearby metropolitan newspaper isn't going to tell me about the incumbent running for reelection who only showed up to one board meeting in the last term; I need the local county newspaper for that.
* We already have enough tax loopholes.
* The definition of "newspaper" is going to get pretty ridiculous fast with this loophole. Do you want your tax dollars to support Goop Weekly? Maybe (I don't know you after all), but I certainly and vehemently do not.
It's just the nature of the business (ie, editors/writers/university english depts tend to be left leaning and then fill the news room with like minded people, with maybe one token conservative guy like NYT does) and even more so when its existence becomes tied to government spending and policy.
Not to mention how hysterical and FUD-filled politics has gotten recently I'm highly skeptical that anything non-partisan wing will be tolerated.
The biases are about ideologies and how idea/stories/people are presented, spun, or casually dismissed in general. A big one is what sources are used.
Additionally, even shamelessly partisan rags like WaPo or Vox would be critical of obvious democrat mistakes too. The bar isn't that low yet where something like SNC wouldn't be covered. It's often in the details and the stuff not said or treat uncritically.
Because I and others are not forced to pay for National Post et al to exist via taxes. Nor are the other ones claiming to be neutral.
Why else would I be talking about CBC and the implications of state-sanctioned media? That's the context. The misguided idealism they'll be neutral.
Or do you mean that businesses should be able to convert to non-profit organisations when the business is no longer viable? I can agree with that sentiment. If the shareholders are prepared to give up control, and the creditors are paid off, it would be great if businesses converted to tax-exempt non-profits instead of going bust entirely.
1. I am not saying they were right or not because I just don't know, just my reading of the post.