For those of you who like end-of-financial year bargains, here’s one that’s hard to beat. The Australian government has a scheme under which it matches donations to certain aid projects on a $3 for $1 basis[1].So if you give $500, the matching funds can bring the grant up to $2000 which is enough to buy books for an entire school in a poor country. In addition, the donations themselves are tax deductible, so if you’re one of those groaning under our top marginal tax rate, the effective cost is only $250.

I got the info on this from PLAN, but a lot of other organisations have access to the same scheme. In addition to PLAN, I’ve always found Oxfam/CAA to be pretty impressive, but there is a wide range of worthwhile options.

I found this info on the Ausaid website. In particular, if all the funds allocated to this program aren’t spent by June 30, they’ll go back to consolidated revenue. So if, like me, you think that aid to the world’s poor ought to have a higher priority in the budget, you can get a lot of effective leverage from this program. I assume the program will continue next year, and I don’t know what would happen if an increase in donations used up the budget allocation early in the year, but it couldn’t hurt to try. Maybe the government would be shamed into allocating more money.

fn1. There’s an “up to” in there, which always rings alarm bells when you’re looking at bargains, but it does appear that the full 3:1 amount is available in most cases.

Via Eugene Volokh, I came to this Boston Globe piece by Jeff Jacoby, who complains that the term “partial birth abortion”, when used in news stories, is normally surrounded by scare quotes, with the explanation that this term is used by opponents of abortion, but disputed by supporters. Jacoby complains about liberal bias here and says, among other thing “when reporting on the same-sex marriage controversy, they should observe that “what critics call ‘homophobia’ — a term promoted by gay and lesbian activists — is not recognized by medical authorities”

As far as I can recall, I’ve never seen the word “homophobia” used in a news story in a major newspaper, other than in quotes, usually direct, but occasionally indirect (“activist X is concerned about homophobia”) Certainly I’ve never seen it used as if it referred to a recognised medical condition analogous to, say, claustrophobia. I looked in Google News and the recent uses I could find were all either in direct or indirect quotes, opinion pieces (including reprints of Jacoby!) or in publications such as Gay Times and Alternet, which don’t claim to be unbiased. Can anyone point to examples that would support Jacoby?
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In today’s Fin (subscription required), Sinclair Davidson, author of a recent Centre for Independent Studies monograph on income tax, restates the hypothesis[1] , most famously associated with Arthur Laffer, that governments could reduce revenue by raising tax rates. He claims that his own calculations have revealed that revenue would be maximized with a marginal tax rate of 35 per cent.

Does the CIS endorse this claim? I don’t recall seeing it in the monograph. But the article refers to Davidson as the author of the CIS monograph, and this piece is associated with a broader campaign by the CIS on this issue, which has included a number of policy monographs and opinion pieces, including a recent attack on me by Peter Saunders. In the absence of some specific disclaimer, I think it’s reasonable to take this piece as part of the CIS campaign[2].

I commented previously that the Davidson monograph represented an alarming lapse in quality control on the part of the CIS, but I’m now coming to think that the problem may be more systemic.

fn1. It is common to refer to the Laffer curve, but the idea behind the curve is obvious, and had been observed by many writers before Laffer. Laffer’s justified claim to fame is the assertion that the US in the early 1980s was on the declining section of the curve. This was one of the arguments supporting the Reagan tax cut. Of course, revenue fell after the Reagan tax cut and Reagan partially reversed it.

fn2. Of course the CIS doesn’t have an official set of policy positions. But it seems reasonable to speak of a CIS viewpoint and to regard Davidson as being representative of that viewpoint as regards tax policy.