Charitable Spending
Some time ago, I read that a good way to manage your charitable giving was to (1) pick a spending goal, (2) carefully select charities, and (3) divide your goal among those carefully selected charities. This strategy helps you to make sure that you achieve your giving goal, but it also helps you say "No" in good conscience. Denying requests from people or organizations whom you have not researched helps you to avoid impulsive giving, scams, and organizations with whose philosophy you might not agree.
So what is a good spending goal? I think the biblical requirement is 10%, but I doubt many people achieve it in practice. A friend turned me on to the idea that poorer people give more than people who are better off in terms of percentage of their income. The nearby chart shows that, of the people who itemize on their taxes, poorer people give about 5.5%. That seems like a good goal for everyone, especially if we want to see the kind of civil society that most libertarians would like to see. Granted, most of us already give a great deal to government institutions through our taxes, and would be inclined to give more to charity if weren't sending so much to Washington and the state capitals, but still I doubt that very many people - especially very many atheists - set a 5% goal.
As the next chart shows, those poor people are likely to be older people. Generally, older people have lower incomes, but more wealth and certainly more inclination to give it away. So maybe it's not poor people so much as it is older people who are donating at the higher rates.
Another interesting aspect to these numbers is the direction of their giving, shown in the third chart. By far, most of it is going to religious organizations, nearly $100 billion per year (chained 2004 dollars). After that, education (donations to alma maters?), health and human services have been consistently the next 3 recipients of largesse. For a while, foundations were a rapidly growing target, but that seems to have slowed. Perhaps, in the go-go 90s, people wanted to shelter their rapidly growing wealth from the tax man? In any case, the contributions are increasing in real terms year after year.
So what is a good spending goal? I think the biblical requirement is 10%, but I doubt many people achieve it in practice. A friend turned me on to the idea that poorer people give more than people who are better off in terms of percentage of their income. The nearby chart shows that, of the people who itemize on their taxes, poorer people give about 5.5%. That seems like a good goal for everyone, especially if we want to see the kind of civil society that most libertarians would like to see. Granted, most of us already give a great deal to government institutions through our taxes, and would be inclined to give more to charity if weren't sending so much to Washington and the state capitals, but still I doubt that very many people - especially very many atheists - set a 5% goal.
As the next chart shows, those poor people are likely to be older people. Generally, older people have lower incomes, but more wealth and certainly more inclination to give it away. So maybe it's not poor people so much as it is older people who are donating at the higher rates.
Another interesting aspect to these numbers is the direction of their giving, shown in the third chart. By far, most of it is going to religious organizations, nearly $100 billion per year (chained 2004 dollars). After that, education (donations to alma maters?), health and human services have been consistently the next 3 recipients of largesse. For a while, foundations were a rapidly growing target, but that seems to have slowed. Perhaps, in the go-go 90s, people wanted to shelter their rapidly growing wealth from the tax man? In any case, the contributions are increasing in real terms year after year.
Labels: philosophy
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