Courtesy of the
Atlantic:
One of the most surprising, and perhaps confounding, facts of charity in America is that the people who can least afford to give are the ones who donate the greatest percentage of their income. In 2011, the wealthiest Americans—those with earnings in the top 20 percent—contributed on average 1.3 percent of their income to charity. By comparison, Americans at the base of the income pyramid—those in the bottom 20 percent—donated 3.2 percent of their income. The relative generosity of lower-income Americans is accentuated by the fact that, unlike middle-class and wealthy donors, most of them cannot take advantage of the charitable tax deduction, because they do not itemize deductions on their income-tax returns.
But why? Lower-income Americans are presumably no more intrinsically generous (or “prosocial,” as the sociologists say) than anyone else. However, some experts have speculated that the wealthy may be less generous—that the personal drive to accumulate wealth may be inconsistent with the idea of communal support. Last year, Paul Piff, a psychologist at UC Berkeley, published research that correlated wealth with an increase in unethical behavior: “While having money doesn’t necessarily make anybody anything,” Piff later told New York magazine, “the rich are way more likely to prioritize their own self-interests above the interests of other people.” They are, he continued, “more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would stereotypically associate with, say, assholes.”
You know I was thinking about this back during the election when the Republicans were talking about Mitt Romney's generosity as defined by how much he donates to the Mormon Church. I remember thinking, "That's not generosity. He is giving to his church which is self serving, and then writing it off on his taxes. That does NOT meet the definition of generosity for me."
And it stands to reason that people who accumulate great wealth place a great deal of importance in having a lot of money, and in possessing the things that money will buy for them. (I am thinking of Donald Trump here.) So I don't think I ever truly bought into the talking point that taxing these wealthier individuals would negatively impact charitable organizations.
Now only speaking for myself, and I am probably considered relatively middle class, I have NEVER written off a charitable donation on my taxes. In fact to me doing so would completely negate the idea of charity.
In my mind charity is a sacrifice of your time, resources, or money, for the good of others. If I was in some way compensated for that it would undermine the very idea of giving to others.
Well at least that is how I always looked at it.
Besides those of us living paycheck to paycheck, and who have to save up for the things we want, understand sacrifice and what it means to do without. For many of us we have undoubtedly experienced times in our lives when we needed support from our community, our friends, or our families, and understand on a visceral level how important it is to have help when you are struggling.
So of course it makes perfect sense to me that those of us who have little to give, give more of what we have. And that those who have much to give, give much less. After all that attitude probably contributes in many ways to why THEY have so much and WE often have so much less.
