"A body blow to the ability of museums to build collections"

Minnesota Public Radio has a piece on the new fractional gift law which you can read or listen to here. It chooses an odd defender of the new law: Pablo Eisenberg of the Georgetown Public Policy Institute, who says the old law was "a big boondoggle tax ripoff enjoyed by those who have the most money" and says the deduction for fractional gifts "ought to be abolished together." That's certainly one position, but it's not an argument for the law that was just passed, which, as I've discussed in earlier posts, leaves the deduction intact, and even adds some extra hurdles into the process (like the requirement that the entire donation be completed within 10 years or at the donor's death) -- but then creates tax consequences so costly to donors that they needn't have bothered with the extra hurdles, because no one's ever going to make a fractional gift under the new law anyway.