Just my two cents: I grew up in Utah and did my undergraduate degree there. The Salt Lake Tribune is a great newspaper (I subscribed while living in the state) and it has been rough watching them downsize and lose some great staff over recent years. I am very much of the opinion that good local journalism is a necessity for holding people accountable. For example: the work the Salt Lake Tribune received a Pulitzer for [0]. Anything to help good local journalism continue and survive is nothing but a win in my view.
I’m still here and this is incredibly important for our community. The tribune is the only major news outlet not owned by the LDS church, and is an important tempering force. Over the years they’ve given up some of their autonomy due to joint operating agreements with LDS Church owned Desert News, but without them salt lake would be a large metro without a non-church controlled newspaper. Which is really strange to write down.
Salt lake looks poised to elect its first LDS mayor in something like 50 years today which I think speaks volumes to the weakening of slc secular news sources. One could argue that it’s due to the modernization of the church on some key issues, but based on the coverage of the candidates, I’m not so sure.
On a national scale, I’m really hopeful this trend continues. Newspapers do incredibly important work on “boring” local issues that no one else is able to do.
In my experience, most people outside of the USA are not very familiar with anything between NY and LA. Usually I have to tell people, I live in Oregon which is north of California. Oh, California, yes we've heard of California. I doubt the majority of the world has even heard of Utah or has any concept of where it is or that SLC is the capital of the state.
Utah... is that the place with the large rocks in the desert? Lots of mormons? It shows up from time to time. Oregon I have no idea. Only thing that comes to mind is the Oregon Trail?
> Salt lake looks poised to elect its first LDS mayor in something like 50 years today which I think speaks volumes to the weakening of slc secular news sources.
Or maybe, rather than signs of weakening secular news control, they're both signals of the success of LDS Church. Living in Toronto until recently, I have with increasing regularity, met LDS proselytizers without trying. Business hotels in suburban office parks in Florida now have their book. To me it just seems like a very successful church. It wouldn't surprise me if they were winning back the mindshare even in urban centres, given the cultural discomfort being experienced in urban North America right now.
> On a national scale, I’m really hopeful this trend continues. Newspapers do incredibly important work on “boring” local issues that no one else is able to do.
Indeed, for local publications it makes a lot of sense; though I am concerned about the potential effect it could have on some stories. For-profit news purchased directly by readers has some redeeming qualities, some of the time, in terms of incentive structure.
It feels perverse to speak of a churches success as a business rather than success through the spiritual satisfaction of its members. It belittles the "good word" and treats it as corporate decor.
The Vatican owns ~15% of the value listed on Italian stock exchanges and somewhere north of $10 billion (US) in total wealth. That's just the vatican - the largest regional subsidiaries are worth more (Catholic Church Germany is about $25 billion).
LDS has somewhere around $65 billion in wealth.
International religious organizations are absolutely businesses. Profit may not be their primary purpose, but they have their fingers in all sorts of business-like enterprises - real estate, stocks, etc.
Do you have any sources for these numbers? They seem low given the value of works of art and real estate held by the church; I'm just curious what the $10B USD figure includes.
That seems low given the amount of property they control and their international foothold, along with the amount of time they have had to acquire their wealth.
Shame on me... I didn't check the date on the source - the Vatican number was taken from a Time Magazine article from 1965. I came up near the top of the Google results and it never crossed my mind that Time published articles that far back.
Regardless of the size of the assets of these organizations, the parent's point is still valid that their success should not be measured in $s. So the Vatican has $10B in wealth, does that mean that they are successfully leading people to heaven? I say these numbers have little to do with what the Vatican exists for. If anyone in the Vatican thinks otherwise, I would say their priorities are off. (I speak about the Vatican rather than the LDS church because I know more about it, being Catholic myself.)
One of the subtle considerations when discussing non-profits is that any organization can be a non-profit, but in order to get tax exemption you have to meet certain requirements related to your mission and how your organization is organized [0]. One of the exempt requirements is education, and there are numerous ways in which it could be argued that a local news outlet can operate as a medium for educating local constituents of important events.
I spent a number of years working in public accounting in the DC area, almost exclusively with non-profit organizations on both the audit and tax side. Tax exempt organizations come under a fair amount of scrutiny, because of how valuable their tax exemption status is, and the government checks everything from executive compensation to programatic expenditures. Most have to get audited annually, and you can read their audited financial statements just like how you could read Apple's or Google's [1].
A key note about tax exempt organizations is that as soon as they start to earn income from activities that compete with typical for-profit organizations, they have to pay corporate taxes on that income. I saw some people implying that Amazon could become a subcompany of WaPo and avoid taxes, which, while technically is in the realm of possibility, would have 3 major consequences: firstly, the 501(c)3 non-profit parent organization can't make dividend-like disbursements to shareholders, so the money would be tied up in the non-profit, secondly, excessive compensation to employees could result in massive punitive taxes [2], and thirdly, the revenue that WaPo would receive would most likely be taxable unrelated business income. Bezos would be better off keeping Amazon separate and donating cash to WaPo -- at least then he'd be able to get a write off.
The requirement of 401c(3)s to be "non-political" looks like a pretty weird to someone that doesn't live in the US. Why do non-profits have to work with that suppression while for-profit companies won't? Does anyone here know the historical context for this?
Not all non-profits, just 501(c)3. Non-profits organized under other sections of the tax code are allowed to be political. [0] Here's an exhaustive list. Some of the sections are pretty narrow in scope (e.g. 501(c)(21) - black lung benefits trust). [1]
There are several other tax-exemption provisions which do apply to political organizations, but with different tradeoffs involved.
To oversimplify, 401(c)3 are exempt from taxation and donations to them can be deducted from the donor's income tax liability. As a tradeoff, they cannot participate in political activity.
401(c)4 organizations are permitted to participate in politics as part (but not all) of their activity, and are exempt from taxation, but donors to them may not deduct their donations.
527 organizations exist explicitly for political purposes and are exempt from taxation. However, donors may not deduct their donations, and 527 organizations are subject to more rigorous regulation and reporting requirements due to their almost guaranteed exposure to campaign finance regulation.
The best way to think about it is this: while the IRS permits many types of non-profit organizations to not pay corporate income tax, the ability of donors to deduct donations from their personal income tax is a privilege specifically granted to charities. Charities are a subset of nonprofits which exist for specific purposes, and political advocacy is not one of them.
Subject to state law, it is often possible to incorporate nearly any type of business venture as a nonprofit (even a conventionally for-profit one, such as a retailer). However, the IRS does not grant tax-exempt status to any nonprofit. Only nonprofits of specific types are granted tax-exempt status.
I'm sure there will be some that will use any article on the opinion page that criticizes the government to use this to fight the non-profit status. After all, if there is one thing that stands out in the political landscape at the moment it is that the government is at war with those segments of the media that are critical of it.
It's quite possible that there will be a court challenge to the non-political requirement. The recent case[1] about union dues for public-sector employees made clear that SCOTUS doesn't want to be in the business of deciding what is political speech versus some non-political opinion.
This looks to be the case, but consider the source of the vitriol hurled down. The par for the course, mcluhan-esque media manipulation is one thing, but this latest round we're referring to comes from a different source with much different motivations.
My guess is this slides under the radar, catching a tweet at best. Could give this outfit a few years to spin up, and by then, who's to say?
Maybe because non-profits are net-creditors of tax consumption and using them to pay for political campaigns means the tax payer funds his political adversaries.
The current restriction is based on a hastily worded amendment to the tax code from 1954 by one Lyndon Baines Johnson, who later became president when JFK was murdered.
It reduces to a few principles.
1. orgs should use their tax-deductible contributions in support of their stated missions.
2. orgs cannot be set up for "selfish" reasons. Because of the present and historical culture of graft (the buying and selling of political favors) in the US, we basically assume that anybody who promotes a candidate gets something in return.
3. confusion in the US Senate in 1954 about the difference between an org's "primary" mission and other missions.
There's also an undercurrent of church-state separation. By dollar volume, houses of worship are very big recipients of tax-exempt contributions. Politicians fear the influence of people in pulpits, so it's easier to prohibit that.
In May 2017, the current president, Donald Trump, issued an executive order weakening the restrictions on political speech. He did this under pressure from his political party and from the "evangelical" churches who support him.
'Churches' (this is a short reply so I don't have the definition handy) actually get additional benefits on top of a 501(c)3.
Specifically, if they follow certain rules they don't even have to file a proper return. They still have to throw some numbers the way of the IRS, but in addition to not having to file, religious orgs do not have to publish their returns (normal 501s must do so, part of the 'transparency' of their tax break is they must show CEO salaries, salaries of certain top paid employees, and other expenditures).
Actually, it’s not quite that they get additional benefits. Churches are automatically tax exempt, with no need to apply for 501c3 status, even. In other words, a better way to look at it is that the gov doesn’t have the right to interfere, so they don’t.
The political-speech restriction and other non-profit rules for houses of worship are the same as for the registered 501(c)(3) charities. But they don't have to seek approval from the IRS, and they don't have to file form 990s every year. (Form 990 is sorta like a corporate tax return.)
In many of these situations, the denominational office has sought approval from the IRS, and has an Employer ID number that appears in the nonprofit search. https://apps.irs.gov/app/eos/ This is helpful for getting access to various corporate nonprofit donations. For example, Microsoft Office for nonprofits is very inexpensive.
Good question. It sounds strange to me too. I wonder if there’s some unintuitive loophole like the paper itself doesn’t write political articles and sources them from other places.
501(c)(3)s can write political articles. They just can't engage in overt political activity. For example, my understanding is that a non-profit shouldn't endorse a candidate and certainly shouldn't make political donations or otherwise actively participate in a political campaign. They're not prohibited from covering a campaign or writing about proposed legislation though.
No, it's just what a 501(c)(3) is: a religious, charitable, scientific, literary, or educational organization, or a handful of other more specialized causes. Note that like a corporation, a 501(c)(3) is allowed to spend a portion of its funds on lobbying, it just can't be the prime focus.
There are other non-profit organization types that are specifically suited for political action. Labor unions are 501(c)(5) and often very political. But most political organizations are regulated under section 527 of the code.
The reason is simple: different codes require different reporting requirements. The 501 codes are heavily scrutinized by the IRS to make sure they are legitimate charitable causes. 527 orgs are overseen by the FEC to make sure that they obey political campaign financing laws. The reporting requirements for both are different.
The Texas Tribune appears to have been created in 2009 as a non-profit. In contrast, the Salt Lake Tribune was founded in 1868, and has been for-profit until now. I believe the unique thing about the SL Trib is its transition from for-profit to non-profit.
Not to the same scale of Amazon, but UPMC (Pittsburgh’s regional medical giant) is a non profit who made $400 million profit a few years ago to some outrage. Their CEO is a pretty high flying guy for being a non profit!
Suspiciously they made near zero profit the next year.
non profit doesn't mean the executive level goes without, charities are infamous in this regard. that colleges can hide their endowments behind similar is just more proof we have a tax system designed to benefit the few and not the many
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
Maybe all solely news media companies should be non-profits. Current incentives have led the news media to churnalism, sensationalism, and the near extinction of long form journalism.
"Yet more loopholes" is what happens when you refuse to think for yourself and instead need to cram everything into tiny, generalising, categories. A better framework for evaluating policy is to ask if their objective is worthwhile and if their mechanism is fit:
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".
How is local news essential to democracy or help make better voting decisions?
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".
Local news won't help much with informed voting for national candidates, unless there's something specific going on like President X is working to close down the local industry etc.
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.
(Convinced into) Not voting for Trump hasn't as much to do with a well functioning of democracy.
>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.
Who decides what's tax-exemption worthy journalism versus yellow press filth / entertainment?
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.
Not sure it could be classified as a loophole really. Unless your an employee or affiliate of the newspaper itself in which case it likely verges on fraud.
It's more like a government-led incentive scheme to support.
In general I think that if the State wants to support some activity it should do so directly by allocating funds, not by making the tax system more complex. The introduction of the GST consumption tax in NZ was admirable in this respect: prior to it there were layers of sales taxes and special tweaks to try to promote specific industries, so the final price at a checkout could be dismayingly more than the sum of the shelf prices. With GST there was a single tax rate, no retail exceptions, and no "sticker shock" since quoting tax-exclusive prices in retail was illegal. About the same time the personal income tax mechanism became simple enough that for ordinary employees four sides of A4 sufficed, completed in half an hour. Bliss! (normalised to expectations of bureaucracy)
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.
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.
What really matters is the effective marginal tax rate.
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.)
Agree with your points on tax simplification in general but I think for deductions it depends on the use case. In the examples of a local newspaper or a charity it has the added benefits of (a) introducing a level of competition which presumably would help keep things a little more optimised and (b) giving the citizen the choice on what they can fund.
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.
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.
You can tie subsidies to the "amount of CO2 spared compared to the average". Carbon tax creates the moral hazard of normalizing pollution, as long as you pay your tax.
But due to the higher costs, all but the wealthiest will be "forced" into making changes to their patterns. There was a recent Planet Money episode about these Pigouvian taxes[1].
"[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 don't think influencing the media should be tax deductible. On the other hand,it does seem like the autotrophs of the journalism ecosystem are dying off pretty quickly and something has to be done.
(Not trying to virtue signal) I pay for my news subscriptions and really think that is worth doing but I don't agree that news should be tax deductible for the following reasons:
* 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.
Congress should bring back the "FCC fairness doctrine"[0] and tie it into tax deductible for news outlets. If you're willing to be an unbiased source for news, you get tax benefits, if you want to be partisan you're a private company.
We have a news company called CBC here in Canada that is supported by tax payers and is supposed to be politically neutral but everyone knows its a left-wing partisan news source.
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.
You know, I disagree about CBC. I get its newsletters, the daily Alexa bcast, and see its YT videos. From my US-based perspective, it seems that they went well out of their way to be balanced in their coverage. They could have buried SNC Lavelin but it was amazing how long they kept up coverage. Their YT channel had daily "Scheer campaign day X" but I didn't see the corresponding videos for Trudeau.
The mistake people always make is assuming left wing partisan = blind support for Trudeau/liberal party. Which is not what that means. The CBC isn't being accused of being a propaganda arm for a particular party. Not is it not about just blatantly supporting a single centre-left political party.
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.
Would you provide some examples of where you think CBC is being left-wing partisan? Also, I wonder why you are so focused on left-wing partisan examples and apparently not at all on right-wing partisan examples?
How is it the same? The newspaper is an actual non-profit (the shareholders had to give up control to get the status) but what you seem to be suggesting is to give for-profit businesses non-profit status for tax purposes even when they are not actually non-profit organisations.
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.
Previous poster implied that all businesses are influenced by government so the non-profit status does not have additional bindings. I answered that if all businesses are regulated by government regardless, why collect taxes at all, since they are all extensions of government willpower.
The impression I got from their post was that businesses are just as prone to government influence as non-profits,[1] not that they are all extensions of government willpower. That does not follow unless you assume that all non-profits are also government puppets.
1. I am not saying they were right or not because I just don't know, just my reading of the post.
The reason the government collects taxes is to make money, not to extend willpower to the businesses it taxes. The extra influence for non-profits is a side effect and not very large compared to baseline laws. It's not a goal, and it wouldn't make up for the loss of revenue; it serves a much smaller and completely different purpose.
I would imagine a non-profit isn't able to well.... profit as much. And if I know one thing it is that a rich guy loves his money as much as a preacher loves the Lord.
Well, I do think it (was) dumb, but I also didn’t bring it up to show a big problem. I just wanted a counter-example to the claim that profits are limited at non-profits.
Thanks. Not sure how I missed that. Regardless, the point still stands. Non-profit just means profit isn't its primary goal, but rather generally some mission. A non-profit can make oodles of money, but if it closes up shop, it can't be distributed to the "owners." It has to go to another non-profit.
The NFL had a specific exemption added to the tax code just for it, so it really isn't a good example anyway. Nobody else could form such a "non-profit" without a literal act of Congress.
As a sibling comment mentions, non-profits aren't always "above board" in reality, e.g. the NFLs or Susan G. Komens of the world.
The position that I'm coming from is that a newspaper isn't always meant to be particularly profitable, e.g. in my small city our major paper is owned and underwritten by a wealthy real-estate family.
While the paper does good reporting in other areas, including having won a recent Pulitzer, they never publish anything negative about the local real-estate and development. You will never find a piece critical of development or developer mistakes in this paper.
If you're of the mind that papers can and are used as a way of laundering business propaganda for the owner, allowing it a non-profit status would then allow it to be a money-sink. The owning family can now provide donations to the non-profit paper which serves the business interests in the PR sphere. These donations can be written off. This means the tax-payer is now further subsidizing their PR efforts by virtue of a tax write off.
I'm going to push away the dubiousness due to the LDS issue and I'm going to assume that the SLT is a good newspaper in the following comment. To be forthright in my bias, my general views on Utah are not that great though... stemming from their stupid fucking criss-crossing streets and over usage of concrete barriers in the middle of the road all the fucking time.
Cough, excuse me.
I'm really curious about the repercussions of this. If this works out decently for them, I'm pretty sure other news outlets of all shapes and sizes will follow in the next few years. Maybe this is good. There's a potential here to revitalize the news system in general. They won't be so dependent on pandering to a select few corporations and bullshit advertising methods. Maybe this will bring some more unbiased... wait, no probably not. Not being funny, that just made me realize the folly. If donations are going to be a big play, the only way to really get good donations is to appease a certain viewpoint. I don't know... maybe there's a way to mitigate that? It does say no more political endorsements... eh... I doubt that'll happen. I was hoping to have a good, happy train of thought on this one. Then I remembered that all humans are assholes.
Fucking hate driving in Godless wasteland of a state.
Yea grid roads are unique to only utah... seriously?
Continously flow intersections and diverging continuous intersections. You end up driving on the left hand side and drive all wonky. Its terrifying to encounter the first time and makes no logical sense. They brought it to colorado springs and it's so amazingly pointless.
the thing that sucks about 501(c)3 is that there are no deductible expenses any more
So they can be used in conjunction with other entities to really amplify the tax benefits
If you think of them like 401k on steroids It can help, as deductible contributions are unlimited up to 50% income and anything above that rolls over into the next year, and you can do a bunch with asset prices and velocity.
Different parts of the tax code pull deductions before or after AGI, so you can game this forever all while the masses can only express their discontent by targeting “income tax rates” and the edgiest of them all says “marginal income tax rates”
“Legacy” just means old or traditional or hailing from a past era, as distinct from publications that have been newly developed in recent times for modern markets and technologies. It’s also distinct from established media orgs like PBS that have been nonprofit from the start.
It’s unusual for a for-profit corporation to switch to a non-profit. Other U.S. media orgs like PBS are non-profit, but have been that way from the start.
Well, we don't do it that way in the dystopian US of the 21st century. Disregarding obscure organizations like the Associated Press, there are only about 172 nonprofit news outlets[1] founded in the last 30 years or so! The concept is practically unheard of.
Not sure if ironic. 172 is definitely on the low numbers for a country of 350M -- especially with 50 states that could have their own local news non-profits (tv, radios, newspapers, online version of the latter two, etc).
> Outlets must be domestic.
> Outlets must be active, though they do not need to be publishing new content on a regular basis to be included in the study.
> Outlets must be young.
> Outlets must be primarily digital.
> Outlets must produce original reporting.
> Outlets sponsored by an institution must produce journalism that focuses beyond its own walls.
"Young" and "primarily digital" are the biggest restrictions.
It is my opinion that in order to retain freedom of the press protections an organization should be required to be non-profit, not specifically 501c3 of course.
Having a non-profit tax status doesn't prevent you from paying large salaries if you make more money. That really wouldn't do anything to take away the incentive the press has to sell more news.
They lost some of their teeth after the joint publishing agreement with Deseret News, but other than npr they are the only major news outlet of any medium in salt lake that is willing to be critical of the church. And it’s not like KUER has much airtime devoted to local news.
[0] https://www.sltrib.com/news/2017/05/07/salt-lake-tribune-win...