{"id":73,"date":"2005-12-04T16:06:05","date_gmt":"2005-12-04T21:06:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/?p=73"},"modified":"2007-12-27T18:13:46","modified_gmt":"2007-12-27T23:13:46","slug":"christmas-gifts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/?p=73","title":{"rendered":"Christmas gifts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s &#8220;Holiday Shops Days&#8221; in downtown New Bedford this weekend, with an antique fire engine carrying Santa Claus, rides in horse-drawn carriage, tree-lighting in front of the Public Library, people singing carols outside our building, marching bands going up and down the downtown streets, sleigh bells jingling.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been sitting here in our apartment enjoying the festive sounds outside our windoww while I&#8217;m paying bills. I just opened up the year-end appeal from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and found the enclosed:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>Katrina Emergency Tax Relief Act of 2005<\/em><\/p>\n<p>As a point of information to donors considering philanthropic gifts to humanitarian agencies and other organizations&#8230; you may be interested in knowing about a recent tax relief act that affects philanthropic giving.<\/p>\n<p>President Bush has signed into law a measure that allows donors to deduct qualified charitable gifts in amounts up to 100% of their Adjusted Gross Income. This temporarily suspends the current limitation of 50% of Adjusted Gross Income&#8230;.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>OK, I doubt that many readers of this blog are able to donate 100% of their adjusted gross income to charities providing services to Gulf Coast relief. But if there are such people reading this blog, I just wanted to let you know that you might want to talk with your financial advisors about whether you&#8217;re able to benefit from increased giving this year. There is still a great need for Gulf Coast Relief. Remember, too, that if you want to donate to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.uua.org\/news\/2005\/050831_katrina\/donate.html\">Gulf Coast Relief Fund of the Unitarian Universalist Association,<\/a> a minimum of 95% of those donations will go directly to services (i.e., the fund has very low administrative costs).<\/p>\n<p>Even those of us who can&#8217;t give 100% of your adjusted gross income in charitable donations should consider giving a gift to Gulf Coast Relief. There are lots of people along the Gulf Coast who could still use that kind of Christmas gift. Carol and I are planning our year-end giving right now, and we plan to give generously to Gulf Coast Relief.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s &#8220;Holiday Shops Days&#8221; in downtown New Bedford this weekend, with an antique fire engine carrying Santa Claus, rides in horse-drawn carriage, tree-lighting in front of the Public Library, people singing carols outside our building, marching bands going up and down the downtown streets, sleigh bells jingling. I&#8217;ve been sitting here in our apartment enjoying [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[299,295],"class_list":["post-73","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-justice-peace","tag-christmas","tag-hurricane-katrina"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=73"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=73"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=73"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=73"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}