Submitted 3 days ago by pieland@piefed.social to youshouldknow@lemmy.world
https://taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/who-gets-tax-benefit-those-checkout-donations-0
Apparently the idea that it gives corporations a tax break is a misconception, rather, YOU get the tax break!
Thanks to @TheRealKuni@piefed.social, @iAmTheTot@sh.itjust.works, and @Zorcron@piefed.zip for that info!
in the USA, if you keep all your receipts and log them with the tax people
Also if you’re taking itemized deductions instead of the standard deduction which is usually a bad call for the majority of people.
Loool, what a bootlicker BS headline then! Thank you for your time to tell us.
The corp doesn’t get the tax break either way.
You only get it if you claim it (in the US), of course. Nobody is tracking that for you.
from your post history it seems you might not be in the us so i’m going to try and clarify
soooo i have yet to file taxes (i’m disabled and have never made enough to file) but from my understanding, how taxes work in the us vs outside of the us is different
the government doesn’t tell you what you owe or what to deduct… you tell them what you owe, what you’re deducting, and hope you didn’t mess up somewhere unless you want to be shipped off the el salvador
so i believe neither my post nor their comment is bs, but if i’m wrong i’m happy to be corrected
Its not going to be worth the effort for the huge majority of people unless you donate a lot of money because of the standard deduction. Its a stupid system but it is what it is.
in the USA
til lemmy lets you edit post titles, very cool. i fixed it, thanks!
The corporation does not get a tax break.
They get the PR, and they get some leverage over the org they’re donating to. But, you know, the leverage is that they stop collecting money to the org, so if you refuse to give in the first place then…
It’s better to give to the charities of your choice without needing some other corp to effectively advertise and collect for them, but that seems unlikely. It probably is helpful that someone is out there advertising. It may be worth making that deal with the corp.
This I knew, but since the charties they’re giving to are usually unknown entities to me and there’s so much charifty fraud in the world around me, I’ve never donated on the spot like that before.
I donate to things on my own time after researching, not pressured on the spot.
Companies collecting for charities while underpaying staff and avoiding taxes is certainly horrible enough to not trust that they are going to pick valid charities.
I don’t give a fuck about a tax break or not. They are the multi million, billion, dollar company. Fuck your profits and you donate.
It’s like tipping. Pay your employees.
They do donate.
Donate more and stop bothering me.
And that’s great! But to the poster’s point, don’t worry about coercing the customer to.
A couple of things here, this is of course a pressure donation where people don’t get the time to think about who they are giving to.
If a company does it right it should have information about the charity readily available. If not, this is a shitty practice in my book.
Many nonprofits have a high overhead. If this is the case a big percentage of your donation could be going into the pockets of administrators.
Also, while the company doesn’t get direct benefits, it does get indirect. Like a goodwill vampire the company is leeching on the act of giving.
Lastly, while the company doesn’t directly financial benefit there are no rules saying they can’t promote a charity that their employees/owners/shareholders have involvement in.
While this may not be a bad thing there is nothing preventing them from picking a charity a major share holder runs thus enriching them especially if the nonprofit has high administrative costs.
This is why I just always default to “no thank you.” I Donate to charities, and I am lucky to have an employer that matches donations and I take the time to use that program. I research who I make donations to and never do it on a whim.
Fuck corporate ‘charities’, regardless
I fucking hate the pressure it puts on you to look like a good person at these check outs. Wtf like I don’t donate to shit unless I look into it and can see if it’s some shady organization or not. Like I was checking out the other day and the cashier said “want to donate to charity to save our oceans” without saying the charity name or anything so I said no but felt awful.
Does it matter if they don’t get a tax break? They’re still generally billion dollar companies.
In my town there’s mostly Safeways, which are owned by Albertsons, which is owned by Cerberus Capital Management, which has something like $65 billion in assets and a net worth of $3 billion. I don’t give a flying fuck if they don’t get a tax break, they could just make the fucking donations on behalf of their fucking customers since they have so much god damned money.
One could even consider it good that the company doesn’t get a tax break from money donated by the customer.
yeah, this is what i was going for
i’m not here to defend billionaires. i’m chronically ill and probably going to die young, suffering, and in poverty. if billionaires did the right thing, not only would i probably be suffering a lot less, but so would a lot of people. we’d probably have a better world.
but here we are. :(
It sucks being put on the spot to donate to a charity I haven’t researched, but I’ve also been a cashier and hated being forced to ask people shit like this.
The worst is when it’s really vague. “Would you like to round up to help veterans?” How? What charity is it? Are we talking homeless vets or “freedom flights” hauling old war vets to the respective memorials? I need details, and some advertising of said charity so I know that the charity in question expects money, assuming there even is one.
None of you people know how the standard deduction and taxes work 🤦♂️.
99.9% of the people in this forum will never itemize ever.
You got a little overzealous with the 9’s there. 10% of taxpayers itemize.
People not understanding taxes is so frustrating. It’s not that difficult to understand even with all the intentional obfuscation.
Assuming the business is following the law, it will not include your donation as part of its business receipts, or income, nor will it claim the charitable gift as an expense.
So we all know how honest and kind hearted all the billionaires are. But still, is there any watchdog monitoring them, that they actually really do not use customer donations as their own?
This topic always causes a lot of negative comments whenever it’s mentioned. Far more people falsely claim there’s a corporate tax benefit compared to people reminding that it’s not true.
There’s a secondary factor: when you donate through the company, they have an increase in gross profit without an increase in revenue. It’s actually worse on their balance sheet from a performance standpoint. Not that it matters much in the grand scheme of things tho.
And this is the same in every country in the world?
you’re right, i fixed it! my bad 😅
You people are mentally weak. Just say no and move on with your life. No one is pressuring you anything by asking a non-committal question. The cashier you’re talking to asked 300 other people that day to donate and did not care on single bit about who donated or didn’t.
DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
Sorry downvoted.
Doesn’t matter, you are still helping them in terms of PR.
“Oh look how good we are, we are a benevolent corpo that raised X Million dollars”
Nah, if you want, you should be donating directly to the cause. Don’t let corpos get good PR for nothing.
pieland@piefed.social 3 days ago
i agree, the point of my post is to clarify the misconception, especially for anyone who may have donated in the past and felt guilty about it
the_crotch@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
The truth is the truth, even if it doesn’t fit your anti-corpo narrative.