Site Encourages Wealthy to Donate Their Tax Cuts

A new website is urging “Americans who have the means” to donate their Bush tax cuts to a group of charities.

The site, known as GiveItBackForJobs, was created by a group of professors from Yale and Cornell. It encourages visitors to “calculate, pledge and donate your tax cut.” It includes a tax cut calculator in which users can enter their adjusted gross income to calculate the “magnitude” of their tax cut. There are also links to five suggested charities, including Habitat for Humanity, the Salvation Army, the Children’s Aid Society, the Nurse Family partnership, and an option to “choose your own charity.”

The site urges the well-heeled to part with some of the money they will receive from the recently extended Bush-era tax cuts to these and other charitable groups, and notes that the donation would still be tax deductible.

“America’s shared prosperity is under threat. Even as the Great Recession devastates the American middle class, the wealthy continue to prosper,” said the site’s home page. “The tax cut deal, while perhaps the best the President could get, will not end this crisis of American democracy. It does too little to help the middle class. And it expects too little support from those who can afford to give the most. Ordinary citizens can, by acting together to create a shadow fiscal policy, correct this failure of government and set the country moving toward a just prosperity.”

The site urges users to donate to “organizations that promote fairness, economic growth, and a vibrant middle class.”

“Such joint action by wealthy visitors to this site will begin to replicate good government policy, outside the government and free from the grip of obstructionists within it,” said the site’s founders. “Because contributions to all of the selected charities are tax deductible, donations made through this site draft the government as a partner in funding the projects that they support. We can, in this way, begin to redeem candidate Obama’s promise that ‘we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.’”