FY06 Charitable Donations
I just barely made the 31 December deadline for tax-deductible donations in FY06. As I did last year, I’m publishing the list of lucky winners, with contribution amounts normalized relative to the largest contribution.
- Institute for Justice - 1.0
- Reason Foundation - 0.83
- Federalist Patriot - 0.67
- EFF - 0.67 (Down from 0.83 last year)
- NRA ILA - 0.50
- FIRE - 0.50
- CATO - 0.33
- Heritage Foundation - 0.33
- VCDL - 0.30 (Up from 0.07 last year)
- Wikimedia - 0.27 (New this year)
- Second Amendment Foundation - 0.0 (No donation this year)
The real changes this year are the removal of the Second Amendment Foundation due to my lack of faith in their effectiveness as an advocacy organization, the reduction of my EFF donation for no other reason than I wanted to provide more support to VCDL and Wikimedia, and the addition of Wikimedia to the list of recipients.
My ideological commitments are unchanged from last year, though circumstances throughout the year have led to the above changes. While I fully support the cause of firearms ownership by law-abiding citizens free from government intervention, throughout the year I was hard-pressed to identity a 2A issue that 2AF took meaningful leadership on. In fact, the bulk of 2AF’s activities, as near as I can tell, is issuing cheeky press releases to anti-gun politicians. As much as I am amused by cheeky press releases, to my mind they do not constitute a substantive contribution to the continued fight for Second Amendment rights, and thus I find my money better spent elsewhere.
VCDL, on the other hand, is the model for grassroots 2A activism. Though their activities are limited to Virginia, they are a potent force, and are worthy of much more than I was able to give them this year.
Finally, I added a one-time contribution to Wikimedia, the organization responsible for Wikipedia among other projects. It’s hard to disagree with the work Wikimedia are doing (unless you work for a Dead Tree encyclopedia company, I suppose), and I thought it might be nice to round out my charity portfolio with at least one apolitical organization, just this once.
Tags: charities, Migrated from Drupal