Isn’t that the usual loophole though? He definitely continues to donate large amounts but I always question setting up a trust that the kids run.
Have you ever tried to donate billions of dollars? It’s actually extremely difficult.
You have to find causes you’re passionate about/things that society needs, find the correct charities to give the money to, make sure your money actually goes towards the thing they say it will (this is difficult), and then figure out how much you can actually donate (you can’t just give N dollars to company Y. They’ve got zero experience managing that much money, and no way to scale into doing it efficiently.)
What happens then is you have $100b to donate, and mostly only do it $10m at a time or less.
Warren’s kids are old now. They’ve all been donating money for YEARS (it’s a mandatory part of their trust).
So yeah, you receive tax benefits by transferring shares to a foundation you also control, but that money is now earmarked for charity. It doesn’t flow both ways, and the laws on this are very tight (bad actors will find a way, but what’s new?).
Everyone does it different and I have no judgement but you could just as easily pick a quorum of folks to do the job with a very explicit timeline. Charitable donations are quite broad in the US. So sure lots of wealthy folk don’t this way but not everyone!
You could always donate it to the US government, but then it'll be used to go start some wars, so that won't work. You could put it in some weird trust where random people can democratically decide what to do with it, but all you have to do is look at the government to see how good of decisions that leads to. So truly what's the alternative?
Approximately 1% of the federal budget is infrastructure. There are huge advantages to donating to a charity that actually does something productive instead of the federal waste machine.
This isn't to diminish all the good things charities have done, but charities are fundamentally band-aid solutions to a dysfunctional society. Leaving welfare at the mercy of wealthy individuals as the wealth gap keeps getting bigger and bigger is a losing strategy. It shouldn't be the state of things people should be aiming for.
Until then, I'm going to look at the real world and conclude that charities do massively more good
Pretending that reality is other than it is nothing short of delusion, living in a fantasy.
Charities do have a place in society and they can do enormous good, but can't compensate for a poor government.
Frankly, the notion that government is fundamentally ineffective and only the private sector can fix things is billionaire propaganda. Billionaires undermine government so they can exploit working-class people with fewer constraints. Then they'd use charity to launder their reputation while pushing their own agenda.
Deriding calls for fair taxes and claiming charities will fix things is wishful thinking at best.
Certainly better than many alternatives, but it’s not a gesture that should make the median income person feel like existing as an excessively wealthy person should be okay/legal.
In my opinion, personal wealth/asset control above a certain level deemed excessive (perhaps $100 million then adjusted for inflation moving forward) should be taxed at 100% and put into a special fund intended to help pay for social services, healthcare, housing the homeless, etc. In the case of asset control perhaps a good method would be to distribute excessively valued ownership stakes to employees or random members of the public (e.g., many of Elon Musk’s shares in his companies forfeited and distributed to others).