Rich folk sure do suck.
MSNBC.com reports that a group of billionaires led by Warren Buffet and Bill Gates is donating half of their wealth to charity:
A little over a year after Bill Gates and Warren Buffett began hatching a plan over dinner to persuade America’s wealthiest people to give most of their fortunes to charity, more than three-dozen individuals and families have agreed to take part, campaign organizers announced Wednesday.
In addition to Buffett and Gates — America’s two wealthiest individuals, with a combined net worth of $90 billion, according to Forbes — 38 other billionaires have signed The Giving Pledge. They include New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, entertainment executive Barry Diller, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, energy tycoon T. Boone Pickens, media mogul Ted Turner, David Rockefeller, film director George Lucas and investor Ronald Perelman.
“We’re off to a terrific start,” Buffett, co-founder and chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, said in a conference call also attended by Bloomberg and San Francisco hedge-fund manager Tom Steyer and his wife Kat Taylor, founder of OneCalifornia Bank.
Buffett said he and Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, and Gates’ wife Melinda made calls to fellow billionaires on the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans — in many cases, people they had never met — to try to persuade them to join the giving pledge.
“We contacted between 70 and 80 people to get the 40. A few were unavailable. We don’t give up on them. Every saint has a past, every sinner has a future. We’ll keep on working,” Buffett said.
It doesn’t surprise me one bit that America’s richest entrepreneurs are extraordinarily generous. It is one of the many reasons I choose rich folks to be my role models rather than poor folks who live off the government teat.
But still, many of these individuals, including Buffet and Gates, have stumped for increased taxes on the rich. If they are so confident that the feds will do good things with the taxpayers’ money, why don’t they follow the example of their German counterparts and give their wealth to the government rather than private charity?
Might it be because they, too, believe that money given to private charity is less likely to be wasted and more likely to do good than money given to an a notoriously inefficient and wasteful bureacracy?
P.S. How come George Soros‘ name isn’t on the list?
9 responses so far ↓
1 Daniel Stoica // Aug 5, 2010 at 4:49 pm
Both of the famous philanthropists state that they choose the charities based on their personal criteria.
Simply handing over the $$$ to a third party to decide what causes to distribute the $$$ to seems inefficient and ineffective to them.
The rest of the population lacks choice once their $$$ is collected in the form of TAXES.
2 Peter // Aug 6, 2010 at 9:28 am
Daniel,
Thanks for the comment.
I agree.
3 German Billionaire Bashes Gates & Buffet for Not Giving Their Money to the State // Aug 13, 2010 at 9:14 am
[...] The Giving Pledge: Instead of Private Charity, Why Not Give it to the Government? [...]
4 Jean Fisher // Sep 21, 2010 at 7:52 am
All this money the rich why not find hard worker
that is going through hard time and help them out. There is some charities that is not going to do right with the money
5 If Government is so Great, Why don’t Rich Liberals Donate Money to it? // Oct 19, 2010 at 10:59 am
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6 Progressive Fat Cats: “We’ll Give More Money to the Government if You Force Others to do the Same” // Nov 20, 2010 at 4:40 pm
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7 Rich Liberals Say Give the Tax Cuts Back to the Feds // Dec 22, 2010 at 1:34 am
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8 More Rich Liberal Fat Cats Claim They Want to be Taxed More // Jun 7, 2011 at 8:54 am
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