I think an even better way is to eliminate the favorable tax treatment of appreciated shares in charitable contributions.

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Agreed. There's a larger benefit to this approach besides putting significant wealth back into a taxable pool.

The creation of "charitable foundations" that, exactly like corporations for profit, can outlive their founder / patron indefinitely has TOXIC effects on democracy. It's bad enough that our form of corporate-friendly republicanism (small R there) favors the accumulation of unfathomable levels of raw economic power into the hands of ten or twenty individuals in a society of fifty million in the 1800s or 150 million in the 1900s or three hundred fifty million in the 2000s. That concentration of ECONOMIC power leads to concentration of POLITICAL power due to the corruption of campaign finance laws which favor "one dollar, one vote" over "one citizen, one vote". But far worse, the ability to transform an obscene concentration of wealth used for continued profit-making into an obscene concetnration of wealth used to pursue "charitable" goals as viewed by the founder is distorting the priorities and artificially narrowing the perspective of the larger public and hindering its ability to move society forward.

As an old example, consider the Ford Foundation. That organization might have a fairly benign profile as of 2024 but between the 1950s and 1970s, its attempts to promote democracy and economic opportunity led to bizarre partnerships with the CIA in Germany and in South America. The Ford Foundation worked with the University of Chicago to bring hundreds of students to the University to essentially be indoctrinated into its distorted view of "free markets" being more important than "free societies." As that mindset was brought back to South America, it resulted in numerous violent coups as perfectly functioning governments were replaced with autocrats more friendly to big business, free trade and less regulation of businesses in the absence of ANY support of those policies by the local public.

As a new example, consider the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Even if you have a nuetral take on Bill Gates individually, why should someone who made tens of billions of dollars solving the software problems of 1980 with MS-DOS and the 1990s with Windows and Office be granted similar outsized influence on issues like public health or poverty? Even if one is willing to stipulate that Gates is incredibly smart and incredibly curious and willing to learn, allowing ONE ultra-rich genius to continue controlling such vast sums of money to solve the next generation of problems is the equivalent of doubling down after winning a billion dollars in the idea PowerBall lottery. The types of problems the world faces are so complex that NO single individual or organization CONTROLLED by one individual is likely to gain a lock on the ideas and intellect needed to solve them. Maintaining tax policies that foster these perma-foundations over DECADES is merely allowing the continued hording of economic resources in alternate forms that could better address the needs of the public if spread more widely throughout society.


WTH