# Optimistic wheeze for the New Year

- Link: https://fundraising.co.uk/2008/12/24/optimistic-wheeze-new-year/
- Published: 2008-12-24T10:59:38+00:00
- Author: Howard Lake

The FT managed to sneak an interesting [story](http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0eb7cd22-d130-11dd-8cc3-000077b07658.html)

in on Christmas Eve, full of hope for overseas development fundraising for the New
Year.

Nobel Prize-winning economist, Sir James Mirrlees and founder of the Fortune Forum
networking organisation for the super-rich, Renu Mehta and have drawn up a scheme,
eponymously called the Mirrlees/Mehta (MM) proposal. Their proposal is to incentivise
giving to some of the UN’s millenium development goals by offering 50% tax relief
on donations. The scheme does two clever things: it alleviate the government’s promise
to spend taxes on the millenium goals by raising private donations, while making
giving more palatable for the 40% tax payers, by giving them more back than they
can with the current gift aid rules.

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With all the doom and gloom in the papers about the recession being worse than previously
estimated (which I’m sure we all expected anyway) you may wonder who these rich 
people are that Mirrlees and Mehta think will donate. However, in any recession,
there are always a category of people who do quite well, as their buying power goes
up in contrast to prices going down. What better way to deal with the guilt of not
being too badly off in a recession than giving to the Third World and getting a 
tax benefit in the process? It could actually work. Mirrlees isn’t a Nobel prize
winner for nothing.

 [⌊Dar al-Kalima Academy art_1708⌉](http://www.flickr.com/photos/emeryjl/507874370)

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