My colleagues Jacob Hacker and Daniel Markovits have created a cool website called?www.GiveItBackForJobs.org that not only includes a useful tool to let you calculate the size of your tax cut, but suggests that “Americans who have the means should collectively give back our Bush tax cuts, by making donations to organizations that promote fairness, economic growth, and a vibrant middle class.”? Here’s a post from the creators themselves that gives more details:
Giving Back the Tax Cut
Daniel Markovitz and Jacob Hacker
If a dysfunctional political process leads to bad fiscal policy – a pretty good first approximation of the current state of play in Washington and the tax deal it produced – what are ordinary citizens to do? Can citizens make shadow fiscal policy that at least partially counteracts the government’s?
On the revenue side, this question raises the familiar specter of Ricardian Equivalence – the proposition that consumers internalize the government’s budget constraint and thus respond to government borrowing by increasing savings, nullifying the stimulative effect of public deficits. ?That proposition has been much discussed of late, including in the blogs associated with this newspaper (see here).?The best current thinking suggests that Ricardian Equivalence does not fully hold – private savings does not offset public borrowing one-to-one. Moreover, even if it did fully hold, a temporary increase in government borrowing would still retain a stimulative effect. Even if consumers do save to offset the public borrowing, their savings will be spread over many years while the increased public spending enters the economy immediately, producing an economic stimulus.
But what about the spending side? Suppose citizens think that government stimulus is unfairly and inefficiently allocated. In the recent tax deal, modest support for middle class Americans was combined with massive tax cuts for the rich. This is unfair: the rich don’t need the help. It is also inefficient: the rich will save rather than spend their tax cuts, so that cutting their taxes yields little stimulus per dollar of deficit. Can citizens adjust their conduct to counteract such wrong policy?
We believe that they can and propose a mechanism for doing so. The most fortunate citizens can convert their inefficient and unfair tax cuts into good fiscal policy. Rather than saving their new-found after-tax income, citizens who can afford it should donate their tax cuts to charities that promote the kinds of stimulative programs that better government policy would provide.
We’ve built a website to help achieve this – www.giveitbackforjobs.org enables citizens to calculate their approximate tax cuts and, acting in concert, give them back to appropriate charities. Acting together matters here. First, each participant encourages others to join as well. Second, by tying giving to tax policy, donors emphasize that they are not giving out of private grace, but from a shared sense of the obligations of citizenship. They practice?political philanthropy.
We’re not so naïve as to believe that all the tax cuts will be given back. But we are convinced that there are many, many Americans who have the means and the desire to encourage a better policy. By actually putting their money where their mouths are, they won’t just be helping out their fellow citizens and encouraging economic growth; they will also be signaling the need for a better?public fiscal policy.
and 
. You can also watch it on 
First, I don’t see it my job to, as your web site declares, “begin to redeem candidate Obama’s promise”.
Second, the Bush Tax cuts were in response to 9/11 and were effective and should remain in place indefinitely to encourage economic growth.
Third, it’s not the revenue side that is out of balance. The progressive tax system is alive and well and the high income earners pay substantially more in taxes than the infamous “middle class”.
Fourth, it’s the spending that is out of control. Previous administrations and congresses have contributed to this, but the current administration has really shot the moon here.
Lastly, if the current rate of excessive federal spending doesn’t subside soon, the savings of the wealthy will be devalued back to the 60′s.
Let me just say that respect the efforts by Jacob Hacker and Daniel Markovitz to raise money for charity, and I hope their efforts will be wildly successful.
While I like their goal, I take issue with a number of things in this article. It is very hard to take an opinion seriously when they use media buzz words and catch phrases as though they actually represent the facts. To say that the rich are receiving massive tax cuts this year is absurd. They are simply not having their taxes raised. Contrasting that with “modest support for middle class Americans” is clever, but misleading. The rich still pay a higher tax rate, and there were no changes made to the income tax rates for the middle class or the upper class this year.
Then, to think that people should be upset that their taxes weren’t raised is delusional. Do they think that people who earn a lot of money will be upset about not having their taxes raised? Has anybody ever actually felt this way?!?! Furthermore, they suggest that this donation program will act as a signal to the government to raise taxes, and they have the hubris to present this as a good thing. Unbelievable.
If there wasn’t so much evidence that this is real, I’d think it was a parody ala The Onion….
James Taranto picked this apart pretty well here:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703909904576051572334343448.html?mod=djemBestOfTheWeb_h
Food for thouht:
From the ATLANTIC , April 2004, page 62, in an article by Michael. J. Sandel, Harvard Univ:
“Why do the successful owe anything to the least-advantaged members of society? The best answer to this leans heavily on the notion of giftedness. The natural talents (and in many cases the financial structures and support) that enable the successful to flourish are not their own doing but, rather, their good fortune – a result of the genetic (and parental ?) lottery. Thus, if our genetic endowments are gifts rather than achievements for which we can claim credit, it is a mistake and a conceit to assume that we are entitled to the full measure of the bounty they reap in a market economy. We have an obligation to share this bounty with those who, through no fault of their own, lack comparable gifts ( and support) ”
Words in parentheses are mine.
I can really feel for the people with student loans that are crippling their lifestyle.
Just that they have no Idea what high taxes are as a working stiff barly getting by. I paid 30% and my tax rate was minor compared to years ago and say you want to be taxed at Eisenhower era levels.
What todays 34.6% is to high?
Your student loans are killing you with your 250,000 income.
Look at 1956′s tax rates.
You are assuming that people aren’t doing this already. Many many are giving large sums of money to charities that do great work, and have done so for generations. By large sums I mean in terms of percentage of income. These people feel it is their moral obligation in response to Gods grace in their lives. By the way, these people don’t generally take vacation after vacation to Hawaii / Spain…etc.
How can these guys be ‘academics’ when they ignore the last 150 years of research on the biological basis for human behavior?
I’d love to see how this works out (my bet is an almost immeasurable amount of $ is contributed *)
* not ‘given back’, which makes no sense in this context.