Friday, September 07, 2007
Big Gifts, Tax Breaks and a Debate on Charity
New York Times: "“When millions of people are dying of AIDS and malaria in Africa, it is hard to justify the umpteenth society gala held for the benefit of a performing arts center or an art museum,” he wrote in his investment commentary this month. “A $30 million gift to a concert hall is not philanthropy, it is a Napoleonic coronation.”"
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4 comments:
This article is very interesting in terms of breaking down how donating huge sums of money works, why, and what happens to the money after it is donated. I feel that the definition of a philanthropist is sort of cloudy though a point is made that billionaires give money to organizations that are close to them which helps causes they know how to maneuver. This is a huge addition to our profession, I believe, and we actually talked about this in Technical Management with Tina earlier this week when discussing not-for-profit organizations. Part of what makes out work so important is reaching out to the people to raise current issues in our art form. Consequently, doing work that warrants donations to your organization is a powerful talent and can eventually be the cause of donations to programs that help the community in other ways.
Most of enterprises and rich men have their motive when they decide to donate money to organizations. Tax break is the primary reason. Next, they hope to save the life of their intimate families or friends by donating money to medical research. A interesting thing is when they give money to arts organization or others, they also consider if the reputation of this organization matches their social position and the invisible benefit as well, such as ceremony, press conferences, and their name shown on the brochure as advertising.
The motive of some billionaires mentioned at this article is good models for other donors. From my point of view, they are REALLY rich, and they are not even able to spend that much money. So they may further consider if their money could go to somewhere and someone really needing money. Hope other rich men, owning less money than those billionaires, can learn a little from them. Meanwhile, the government needs to reconsider the tax policy. The rich indeed should pay much more percentage of tax than the average taxpayer.Then the government can get money to improve "the infrastructure".
It is dissappointing to see how much money is not destributed back into the system because the extremely rich are working around it. Like all the money that the Gates Foundation is spending on people OUTSIDE our country. And they aren't being taxed for it. There needs to be some parameters that allow people to donate without being taxed, but then for certain areas of donations they can't weasel their way around taxes.
I can understand both sides of this issue. And while i'm sure plenty of wealthy people donate only for the tax break I can't believe that that is the only reason or everyones. prehapes it would help to make the tax break smaller, but in the end we can't tell people where to give there money. And the fact is that they are giving there money away to causes the feel need it and will benefit from it.
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