And she says that while the standard deduction may have been designed decades ago with an assumption that most people give to charity, nobody can say whether it accurately reflects now what people actually give. Leslie Lenkowsky, a professor of philanthropic studies and public policy at Indiana University, says charitable giving would increase under Bush's plan, but not as much as the Independent Sector study suggests. The best incentives for increasing donations to charity, he says, are a strong economy and a culture that encourages people to get involved with charities in their communities. For his part, Cohen is not optimistic about what such a study would find. In the end, he says, politicians who support an expanded tax break are likely to find that everything has a cost.
Politicians hate to make hard choices.
So they make easy choices and they make a hard tax system.