Charity

Felix Salmon, from an excellent post arguing that privately-financed public parks (as Central Park mostly is) are a bad idea; emphasis mine.

Indeed, more generally, the big problem with the charitable-donation tax deduction is that it’s effectively a multi-billion-dollar tax expenditure on the rich, even as charitable donations by the majority of the US population don’t get subsidized at all. If it were abolished, or scaled back, the amount saved by the government would dwarf any reduction in charitable donations: in theory, the government could simply make up the entire shortfall and then some, and still come out ahead. As a rule, it’s always easier and cheaper for a government to subsidize something directly than it is to try to fiddle around with laws which have the same effect but don’t show up on the official accounts.