There's a word for this, I think -- "charitywashing" or "philanthropywashing"...
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P.S. If I ran a news outlet, any mention of charitable contributions would be given in percentages of the donor's wealth.
For that matter, I'd probably create a metric-style unit for this -- "micronetworth" or similar.
@woozle how many mooches is that?
@woozle @StillIRise1963 @timo21 @hwll "this is the equivalent of a person making $175,00/yr giving $.02 to their preferred charity."
@ktneely @StillIRise1963 @timo21 @hwll
Yeah, that's another good way of expressing it -- call it MCAD, maybe, for "Middle-Class-Adjusted Dollars".
@woozle @ktneely @StillIRise1963 @timo21 I remember reading in the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (quite long and meandering, but wish more people had read it) one character lays out a progressive economic theory where money **expires.** Which sounds outlandish at first but I can't stop thinking about it.
One of the refrains of the book goes like "even if you redistributed all the wealth after a few years the rich would be rich again and the poor would be poor again" which begs the question: why can't we just keep redistributing it so we could all enjoy the gifts civilization?
Obviously there are more structural changes you could make to help overall equity / power imbalances. And there would be new problems to address if we implemented expiring money.
But even as a bandaid solution, some mechanism to keep money moving between as many people as possible seems preferable.
@woozle @StillIRise1963 @timo21 @hwll It'd also be pretty great to note how much more money the 'charitable donation' saved them on taxes.
@obscurestar @woozle @StillIRise1963 @timo21 @hwll I spent most of my career in nonprofit fundraising. It was a trip, especially the “dealing with incredibly entitled people” part. OTOH, until our country decides to underwrite the orgs that actually take care of our people, it’s the system we’ve got. Particularly right now, private philanthropy has the capacity to save the day.