Writing in the New York Times, Stephanie Strom brings yet another instance of how corporations and their enabling political benefactors have clearly had their way with the tax code. Organizations, including the American Red Cross and Catholic Charities, have complained that the current tax deduction for use of a personal car while performing volunteer services for charities was too low at 14 cents a mile. That is compared with 58.5 cents a mile for corporate employees who use their cars for business purposes. Simply inexcusable. And on Wednesday, four senators plan to announce a proposal to reset the charitable mileage deduction to 70 percent of the corporate deduction. Seventy percent? Way to even out the disparity, clowns. Tax breaks are inserted into the tax code as a means of either encouraging certain behavior or restoring fairness to a perceived inequity. That the use of personal vehicles for business deserves a tax break of some four times that of charitable use indicates that, as a society, we either 1) believe personal vehicles should be used way more for business than for charity (free market, baby!) or 2) that it would be really unfair for people who use their personal vehicles for charity work to see a tax break equal to those who use them for business. Put to a vote, it's hard to see how either of these options would win in a citizen ballot initiative. Common decency would forbid it. One wonders, then, what sort of conditions foster this kind of shameful disparity in the tax code. Photo by Flickr user genericstrasse used under a Creative Commons license.