“The vast majority of Americans, if they donate at all, can maybe give a few hundred dollars a year without getting into financial problems.”
By the source you cite (pasted below), the average American is giving either nearly $1k or $2.5k per household. But I don’t think they tend to give it to highly effective charities. The data I’ve seen and analyzed finds that most of it is domestic, a lot of donations to fund one’s own church and local community things. Relatively little to global health and development, animal welfare (other than companion animals), or catastrophic risk reduction.
My impression (the data is somewhat hard to come by) is that a larger share of the income of billionaires goes towards causes that might be seen as global priorities relative to income for non-hyper-rich Americans.
At least in the current political environment, I’d be fairly confident that large tax increases on billionaires mostly be redistributed towards lower and moderate-income Americans, and towards services for us, and not go towards global priorities.
$2.5k for general families (more than one person), $737 for the mean individual American, so even lower for the median. I think that holds.
I also think that if poorer people indeed give a higher proportion to church, this is probably because you’re expected to give a certain amount to your local church that does not scale linearly with your wealth (e.g. a billionaire that goes to church is also expected to place a couple bills in the jar, and not e.g. give them some gold bars). If that’s the case that would mean that the wealthy give a lower proportion by virtue of them having more money, and if that money was redistributed not much would change.
As for redistribution. It might be redistributed towards lower income Americans and not global priorities, but that would still be a vast improvement over the status quo if the billionaires are spending that money on luxuries, or worse, buying votes, politicians, social media platforms, etc.
“The vast majority of Americans, if they donate at all, can maybe give a few hundred dollars a year without getting into financial problems.”
By the source you cite (pasted below), the average American is giving either nearly $1k or $2.5k per household. But I don’t think they tend to give it to highly effective charities. The data I’ve seen and analyzed finds that most of it is domestic, a lot of donations to fund one’s own church and local community things. Relatively little to global health and development, animal welfare (other than companion animals), or catastrophic risk reduction.
My impression (the data is somewhat hard to come by) is that a larger share of the income of billionaires goes towards causes that might be seen as global priorities relative to income for non-hyper-rich Americans.
At least in the current political environment, I’d be fairly confident that large tax increases on billionaires mostly be redistributed towards lower and moderate-income Americans, and towards services for us, and not go towards global priorities.
$2.5k for general families (more than one person), $737 for the mean individual American, so even lower for the median. I think that holds.
I also think that if poorer people indeed give a higher proportion to church, this is probably because you’re expected to give a certain amount to your local church that does not scale linearly with your wealth (e.g. a billionaire that goes to church is also expected to place a couple bills in the jar, and not e.g. give them some gold bars). If that’s the case that would mean that the wealthy give a lower proportion by virtue of them having more money, and if that money was redistributed not much would change.
As for redistribution. It might be redistributed towards lower income Americans and not global priorities, but that would still be a vast improvement over the status quo if the billionaires are spending that money on luxuries, or worse, buying votes, politicians, social media platforms, etc.