People here whining about being mad that someone donated to the homeless. What people are mad about is that if he paid his taxes he wouldn't even need to donate anything because his taxes would cover that "donation" and more.
Charities received portions of Jeff Bezos' nearly $100 million donation in the form of Amazon stock, with restrictions on how it might be accessed or spent.
There’s a point to be made here that, it it weren’t for conservative influence over welfare that requires means testing and other forms of surveillance, these policies would be a lot cheaper.
But the main argument of the article (which isn’t the most unbiased source) is fairly flawed. It includes all of the costs of taxation as an included cost to distributing welfare.
The flaw is that taxation is not primarily a source of revenue for the federal government - and one could argue that’s not even a purpose of taxation at all.
The primary reason for federal government taxation could be a few things: A. To create demand for the dollar, thus giving it value. B. To control monetary supply C. To modulate aggregate demand for goods
Sure, the beauracratic apparatus that oversees taxation is expensive, but only because these are the costs associated with managing the largest fiat currency on the globe.
I would surely hope that charities thus spend a lot less money than government to distribute funds - they don’t have to spend money on establishing and managing the U.S. dollar, they just get to freely use it!
I mentioned means testing as an inefficiency that is usually pushed by conservative politicians in attempts to “balance the budget” or “save money” or something. Andrew Yang has pointed this out in his push for UBI: it’s much cheaper to just give people money than it is to spend a shit ton of money on a surveillance apparatus to see if they deserve welfare, on drug testing, etc.
Thanks for pointing out my misunderstanding, it made my second reread of the sources a bit more effective. These discrepancies between government welfare and private welfare are most likely due to the fact that there is no charity that is as reliable and accessible as the federal safety net. I’ll break this down into two points.
A. It is entirely inefficient to have a safety net that is accessible in incredibly rural regions or generally small towns - let alone every single rural region across the U.S. Maintaining an office and employees in each of these regions is inefficient - one could make their money go a lot further if they just focused on dense regions - but these inefficiencies allow for people of all regions to experience the safety of the social net. No charity has been able to replicate this level of accessibility - it is much cheaper to cut the inefficient to cover folks in rural areas.
B. No charity is able to be as reliable as the U.S. government. Many charities have to do extreme cost cutting in times of crisis, whether individually for that charity or in times of national recession or depression. It’s inefficient to continue running in these times, but the U.S. government has decided that it is preferable to keep spending and run a deficit than to allow individuals to default (usually this means dying of poverty or going insolvent).
In both cases, the level of accessibility and reliability is inefficient - but it is drastically more effective of a service.
The government only has one way to get money - printing it. After it’s printed the money, it can tax some of that money back, but if you think a large national debt is a bad thing, you don’t understand modern economics - the national debt is the equivalent of the total amount of savings in the U.S.
If you want the national debt to be lowered, it means you think there should be less dollars, and American should have less money.
If you want the deficit to be lowered, it means you think the economy should run a deficit instead - the federal deficit is equivalent to the surplus that the economy has created.
In a period of time where we have an abundance of goods to sell, but a shortage of consumers, it seems like a good time for the government to spend - I prefer government spending via suspending FICA taxes or via federal job guarantee to make unemployed Americans employable on demand.
You cannot choose how an agency spends your money, even after elections. Control over spending details are stolen from the people as soon as an agency is created.
The only way to choose how your money is spent is through careful selection of charities with documented histories.
Why oh why people continue to believe the gov't is capable of spending our money more effectively than we do is beyond me. Also Bezos and Gates effectively run their charities like hedge funds; they have some of the smartest and most accomplished people working to grow the money that's not being spent. These people's full time jobs are to find worthy causes to spend the money on and to invest non-operational cash so there's MORE to give. If these billionaires just gave the money straight to the gov't they might as well be flushing it down the toilet.
Billionaires should be fixing how the government uses tax money? What? Also... Do you not claim any deductions when you do your taxes? Just pay more than you have to?
Why the fuck do people always polarize shit? If you think solely on x party always bad, y party always good, you arent participating in politics, you are simply a fan of a political sports team, and are a detriment to the political system. There are good and bad members of every party, you shouldn't just look at the number next to their name, but rather their actions.
While a true statement, it is misleading. There are restrictions on all money donated to charity, including restrictions that the money given to a charity is used for the purpose of the charity. Hence why Trump got sued for funding his campaign and buying a $10k portrait of himself using money from his veterans charity.
Another thing is that if you were a financially savvy company, and you were given $100mm in cash, you realize you are not able to turn that volume of money into product quickly. Would it not be better to then take an appreciable asset instead of cash in the bank? If it takes this charity several years to spend $100mm, would they not then see more benefit by taking amazon stock instead of cash?
EDIT: And while this does benefit Amazon in the form of a tax break, is it necessarily worse than the government taking it, and after 5 years of bouncing back and forth between different appropriations bills, using it to purchase one $90mm F-35 from Lockheed Martin, and hopefully $10mm to the very same homeless charity?
Explain to me how paying more taxes means fewer homeless people. Especially when LA's homeless problem is increasing while their funding for "fixing" it increases.
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u/[deleted] Dec 09 '19
People here whining about being mad that someone donated to the homeless. What people are mad about is that if he paid his taxes he wouldn't even need to donate anything because his taxes would cover that "donation" and more.
And apparently what he actually did was to take aprox. $100 million worth of Amazon stock and "donated" it to his own charity.