Posted 8:37 PM by steve

Democratic Senator Ben Cardin from Maryland just introduced a bill to save the newspaper industry... by letting newspapers convert to non-profit status.

Maybe.... someone ought to explain to the good (said sarcastically) Senator that non-profit doesn't mean non-profitable. Even non-profit organizations need to bring in more cash than they spend or they will go out of (non-profit) business.

The problem for newspapers is not that they are taxed on the income they make, their problem is that they have no income on which to be taxed. In effect, the newspapers are already non-profit.

And while official non-profit status does allow an organization to accept tax deductible donations, given the rate at which newspapers are now losing money (due to their refusal to trim operations to the level that can be supported by the advertising and circulation dollars they bring in), does anyone expect that enough of these deductible donations can be found to offset the rather large cash deficits newspapers are now running?

And before newspapers get all excited about raking in piles and piles of donations, perhaps they might want to rethink their almost universal support for Obama's budget which reduces the tax benefit of charitable contributions.... It's real easy to support tax hikes which only affect other people but it isn't as much fun when those taxes are coming out of your pocket, right?