Anyone who contributes $100 to NPR deducts $100 from their income for tax purposes. So the public is paying, in that he or she would have paid $40-50 in taxes on it otherwise.
Tax math: it's the marginal tax rate you have to look at for deductions, i.e. the rate you'll pay on the next dollar you earn, or save on the dollar you deduct. We don't have a flat tax at the Federal level, or most states.
We can find plenty of taxpayers in NY, CA, or MA who have a marginal rate of 40-50%. They are the highly affluent people that those PBS pledge drives featuring Baby Boomer musical acts are aimed at.
> California is easily close to that, when you add up Federal and State income taxes. As is New York.
No, it's not. Someone making $250k in California pays an effective Federal rate of 22% and state of 8%. Even someone making a million a year sees an effective rate of ~42%. (And that's before tax avoidance strategies they'll undoubtedly pursue.)
> Anyone who contributes $100 to NPR deducts $100 from their income for tax purposes.
Itemized deductions these days are either extremely small (limited to a few hundred dollars) or only for the very wealthy.
During the Trump years, the standard deduction was doubled, with the result that vastly fewer people now itemize deductions. Yes, you can report a limited amount of tax-deductible donations, but last time I looked it was around $300/yr (and even that was easy to overlook).
The $300 charitable deduction was just in 2021, you basically can't get a federal charitable deduction anymore. Might get one at the state level though.