Give to Receive

Trey Smith

Unsurprisingly, the 99% are much more generous than the 1%. Households earning less than $25,000 give away twice as much as richer households as a fraction of their income. The disparity is even greater given that many if not most of the 99% do not itemize their tax returns and therefore do not take a tax deduction for charitable contributions.
~ from The Giving Season: Why the 99% Are Actually More Philanthropic Than the 1% by David Morris ~

In his writings, Lao Tzu talks about the concept of contrivance -- to plan with cleverness or ingenuity -- a lot. In my mind's eye, a lot of the "giving" by the well-to-do falls under this definition.

As Morris points out above, when poor folks like me make a donation, it is without the expectation of receiving any personal benefit. We give because we realize that there are others in worse situations than we are. We may not have a lot of disposable income, but we have enough to help someone else, a little here and a little there.

When most rich people make a donation, they have an eye on their tax return. Throughout my life I have known of many individuals and families who ONLY make donations near the end of the tax year for the SOLE purpose of lessening their tax bill. If the deduction for charitable giving was removed from the tax code, they wouldn't make any donations. There would be no [ulterior] purpose in doing so.

Long ago, I co-managed a nonprofit Thrift Store. You could easily tell a person's financial standing by the interaction you had with them when they came to donate items. When people of limited financial means brought clothes and household goods, they either dropped them off after hours anonymously or, if they came during working hours, almost none of them was interested in receiving a receipt of donation.

People of financial means behaved quite differently. They were very pushy about the receipt. They wanted everything -- and I mean every single doodad -- listed and they would haggle with us over the estimated value of each donated item. If we marked something down for, say, $25, it wasn't uncommon at all for them to demand that we change it to $50 or $100.

At the time -- I was much younger then -- I didn't understand WHY these folks were so pushy and meticulous. Why was it so damn important that a shirt or a set of bowls be valued at $10 instead of $5?

As I got older, I came to understand that, the more that items were estimated at higher values, the less taxes these folks had to pay! Consequently, I came to understand that their so-called giving was more about what they would receive later -- the reduced tax bill -- than helping someone less fortunate.

It was little more than a game of contrivance. They sought to give as little as possible in order to reap the greatest benefit for themselves.