whatever one's beliefs are, it is very intuitive to everybody what is going to happen to charitable contributions if the tax deduction is removed.
In accounting grand scheme of things employee salaries, materials, depreciation of capital assets, etc is just the same thing as charitable contributions - just deductions.
That would only be a meaningful comparison if we were talking about wether or not money a business doesn't have because it was spent on wages should nonetheless be counted as taxable earnings.
>money a business doesn't have because it was spent on wages should nonetheless be counted as taxable earnings.
that is exactly how it works. All business revenue is counted as taxable earnings unless that amount is reduced by deductions. Money spent on wages is just a such a deduction. Charitable contributions is just another such a deduction. No difference.
And that's the point, nobody is challenging that, for good reason. Changing the deductibility of charitable contributions would be just like that, a redefinition of the tax base. The tax base is orthogonal to the tax rate, which is why decreasing the corporate tax rate does not make employees more expensive.
(well, occasionally the idea of gross revenue taxation sparks up, but I have not seem that anywhere in this discussion, and it never survives the first mentioning of vertical integration anyways)
One possible outcome is that you donate more before getting the same net return.
It really depends on the target metric: Do you want to donate at least x? Do you want to net at least y? Or do you want to pay at most z in taxes? Only z would cause reduced contributions from shrinking tax rate. Unless of course there is some disguised return channel hidden in the charity and those contributions are not as selfless as they are supposed to be to legitimate deductibility.
In accounting grand scheme of things employee salaries, materials, depreciation of capital assets, etc is just the same thing as charitable contributions - just deductions.