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February 3, 2006
The Bramble Bush
by Kevin Morford

Giving Until It Hurts

     One of the vanities exercised by many wealthy people is to leverage their charitable contributions in order to have their names attached to some prominent building or institution. The Rockefeller Institute for Government, the Carnegie Mellon University and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts are a few of the nationally known examples of this form of egoism.

     But the same thing happens on the local level all over the nation and the world. These rich donors might as well be screaming “look at me, I gave away some money, I’m a hero.” Of course, with very few exceptions, that claim is a crock of BS.



     In the United States, the true champions of charitable giving are those who earn less than $25,000 per year. They are the people who give the highest percentage of their income to charity. They are also the people who are most likely to endure personal hardships because they are giving to others. The rest of us are pikers by comparison.

     The charts accompanying this column tell the first part of the story, which is where the charitable contributions in the United States come from, and where they go. In 2004, which is the most recent year that I could get data on, charitable contributions totaled more than 248 billion dollars. More than three quarters of those contributions came from individuals. The remaining one quarter was split between corporations, foundations and bequests. Naturally, the corporate media did not let that stop them from giving a lot more attention to donations from corporations and foundations than it gave to donations from individuals.



     Religion is the single largest recipient of charitable donations, receiving 35.5 percent of all charitable contributions in the United States. Education places a distant second, receiving 13.6 percent of the contributions. These two categories alone account for nearly one half of all of the contributions in 2004.

     Foundations are an interesting category. They received $24 billion in contributions, yet they donated only $28.8 billion in contributions. The extra $4.8 billion came from earnings on the vast fortunes that they control. Those fortunes are supposed to be devoted to charitable purposes. The $4.8 billion the foundations doled out from their own earnings is rather small compared to the wealth they control, and is only a small incremental addition to the charitable giving in this country.

     You can read the charts for yourself to see how the rest of contributions were allocated. There were some surprises for me in there, and you may find some as well.

     But these charts only tell a part of the story, because they do not show us who is being generous and who is being stingy. The fairest way to evaluate that is to look at donations as a percentage of household income.

     According to Independent Sector, a Washington D.C. based non-profit organization, people who earn less than $25,000 per year, on average, give 4.2 percent of their household income to charity, while those earning $100,000 or more contribute only 2.7 percent. This discrepancy is even more significant because the wealthier donors have a much greater percentage of their income that is not needed for basic living expenses. The low-income donors not only give a higher percentage, but they are much more likely to be economically deprived because of their generosity.

     It gets worse at higher income levels. The non-profit group New Tithing reports that, except for the senior donors, donors in the upper middle class and middle rich income levels (annual income between $200,000 and $10 million) are half as generous as less affluent donors. If those wealthy donors were giving a proportionate share to charity, there would have been more than $26 billion in additional giving in 2003.

     Another interesting statistic is that, according to the NonProfit Times, African Americans are about 25 percent more generous than European Americans. For example, among those in the $30,000 to $50,000 income bracket, African Americans donate an average of $528 per year, compared with $462 per year for their European American counterparts.

     Americans who are age 65 or older are more generous than younger Americans are, and donate a higher percentage of their income to charity. They are also more likely to volunteer their time to charitable organizations.

     So, don’t be too impressed by the publicized giving of the wealthy. Many of them are just putting their money where their publicity is. The true heroes of charitable giving are the poor, the oppressed and the senior citizens.











Kevin Morford is a political activist and an attorney in private practice in the Anchorage area.  He can be reached at kmorford@insurgent49.com.
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