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It is very strange for someone like me who, I guess, could be said to be a libertarian lite to disagree with a party of the left wanting to privatise taxation, but then again there is multitudes of things that are not dreamt of in my philosophy.
Basically, the Green’s idea is this:
One such proposal is the idea to transfer stamp duty on credit cards to designated charities, a proposal flagged at yesterday’s conference. As Green Party spokesperson on finance, I believe that this proposal is very worthy of consideration, and if not included in December’s budget it would be my intention to move a suitable amendment, if a Finance Bill gets to be introduced.
Now, I am not a big fan of charities. Now, note the word charities, not charity. When people walk about Dublin spending money on frivolous things like Adam Sandler’s latest and people are going without food in Africa, you know something is wrong.
Now thankfully many people do stop and think before entering the cinema and give money to good causes but then the trouble starts. From the Special Olympics UK website:
On average, of every £1 generated by a UK charity, 80p is spend directly on achieving the objectives of the charity and 20p is spend on operating and administration and fundraising costs.
One of the many reasons for this is that the charity pie is limited and, with so many organisations taking slices of this pie, they are all squandering money on overlapping administration and advertising costs. That 20% loss of money is even greater for charities that work overseas. Take the likes of Concern, Goal, and Trócaire: all doing great work, but why are they three separate organisations? What is the tripling of administration staff achieving if not waste?
Because charity and alleviating suffering is so vitally important, we can’t have any of the charitable donations spent on needless bureaucracy.
I guess the libertarian argument would be that scattered charities would be a good idea as it breeds competition but that forgets the very basics of why competition works. That reason is choice. Unlike almost any other field—be it health, education, transport, whatever—the poorest people in the world don’t have a choice from where they get their money.
So when I see the Greens calling for stamp duty on credit cards to go to charity, I have to wonder how effective it will be with the money being a split into numerous charities where administration costs get overlapped and the however many millions from stamp duty being lost from other worthy causes like health and education. What is that saying, “race against waste?”
Actually, Concern, Goal and Trocaire each have admin overheads significantly lower than 20%.
And Concern and Trocaire are both part of international networks of aid agencies who work together. Concern’s group, Alliance 2015, is less tightly bound than Trocaire’s group, Caritas (which is part of the Catholic Church), but there is still significant cooperation. For example, after the tsunami, Concern were sharing offices and administration costs with the German agency Deutsch Welt Hungerhilfe (German Agro Action) in Banda Aceh.
In terms of the use of having many charities, most of them actually specialise in the field. For example, Oxfam UK are known as the WatSan (water & sanitation) experts. It allows specialisation to some degrees.
For a self professed libertarian there’s a bit of the centralising stalinist about what you’re saying.
As Keith points out, most overseas charites have ‘administration’ costs significantly less than 20% as a quick check on their websites will show. But even this figure is somewhat misleading as a large proportion of the ‘admin’ costs is often fundraising expenditute - the business of trying to raise the much needed money in the first place. And, for me, an operating profit of 500% or even 900% (which in commercial terms what spending 10% on admininstration and fundraising amounts to) is absolutely fine.
There’s also the fact that each of the charities you mention have a different approach and focus, work in different areas and on different projects. A large number of charities gives donors the choice to support the ones they feel are doing the best work, in the most effcetive and efficient way.
Hold on Simon, does that mean that the individual card holder would have the right to nominate a charity that the stamp duty would go to? If so it does, as you note, beg a number of questions. What if one doesn’t want to donate to a charity but would prefer it to go to the state? Is that an option?
Here’s another suggestion - abolish the ridiculous card tax. It’s the b@stard child of stamp duty on cheques which should have been abolished not extended. It’s a stealth tax and regressive to boot.
Hold on Simon, does that mean that the individual card holder would have the right to nominate a charity that the stamp duty would go to?
I think that is what the greens are saying