[img]139|left|Jessica Gadsden||no_popup[/img]Call me Scrooge.
I just received the annual year-end letter from my accountant, advising me on ways to minimize my tax burden. Charitable giving, it says, is one of those ways. As many of those around me are considering to which charities they should donate before the end of the tax year, I am watching in fascination because I don’t give. And I’m in good company because Joe Biden doesn’t, either . . . well not much.
Every year the Vice President releases his tax returns, and every year commentators remark on how little of his income he donates to non-profit organizations — less than the two percent given by the average American. Every time I happen upon those columns, I think, why does Joe have to give? After all, he’s in “public service.” Isn’t that enough? Plus he’s had to support a house in Delaware in addition to his home in Washington, a few kids, and his aging (now deceased) mother. Shouldn’t those be his first priorities?
Some time ago in this column, I mentioned that I don’t work for free. For years, I donated my time, and some money, to various organizations. It amazed me that the same people who deemed me unsuitable for paid work were more than happy to exploit my skills when they didn’t have to pay for them. And those same organizations were happy to solicit donations as well.
Am I, Are You Making a Difference?
But I began to wonder, did all my giving do any good?
Looking at America’s largest charities on the most recent Forbes’ list, it doesn’t seem so. There’s the stalwart, the American Cancer Society. How’s that going? Not well, in my estimation. Cancer rates are skyrocketing. There’s also the American Diabetes Assn. With a prediction that a full third of America’s children will be diabetic as adults, are they fulfilling their mission? Everybody loves the idea of Habitat for Humanity, but lots of folks (including tons of families with children) are still homeless. Food for the Poor raises buckets of cash, but the poor are more food-insecure than ever.
The biggest of them all, the United Way, purports to assure their charities’ recipients have a quality education that leads to a stable job, enough income to support a family through retirement and good health. Has anyone from the United Way looked at recent government statistics? Public education is failing. There are five or six applicants for every job opening. And the jobs that remain are anything but well-paying. Even setting aside the recent, “great” recession, income has stagnated for forty years. Plus our collective health is in decline. Should I pour money into one of these organizations? It seems like a lost cause.
More than a decade ago, I heard former NAACP Chairman Julian Bond give a speech that made me reevaluate giving both my time and money. In this speech, Bond spoke of years of efforts by individuals to change things in America. He likened many past and present efforts to rescuing babies from a river. In Bond’s allegory, two men sit by a river when to their great surprise they see a helpless baby come floating by. They jump in and save the child. To their horror, another baby comes down the stream, and then another. One of the men jumps in the water a third time and the other man begins to run upstream.
“Come back!” says the man in the water. “We’ve got to save this child!”
“You save it,” says the running man. “I’m gonna find out who’s throwing babies in the water, and I’m gonna make him stop!”
My Charity Choices
Many of our charities seem stuck at the individual baby-rescuing level. They spend time watching the babies float downstream, keeping records of when they’re most likely to arrive, whether they come in bunches, their race, their age and their gender. A few are even occasionally pulled out of the water before they drown. But most of the time, these charities simply describe the problem and collect money to support those who are making the observations.
I just finished a documentary on underage girls forced into prostitution and an organization working to save them. The work of the group was quite moving. But it didn’t address the main issue of the hoards of men who were paying for and soliciting sex from these same underage girls – a much bigger problem.
In the last few years, even I have succumbed to the most heartfelt solicitations. First, there was money donated to Equality California and its effort to secure the right of same-gender couples to marry in California. That obviously didn’t work out well. The money from closed-minded folks out of state far eclipsed the one hundred dollars I gave. It did make a nice wedding gift, though to one same-gender couple lucky enough to marry in that brief period before Prop. 8 reversed the California Supreme Court. Then there was twenty-five hundred to protect local farmers, now eclipsed by the Food Safety Modernization Act, the biggest agribusiness-friendly bill to come out of Congress in a long time. I also made some donations to various literacy foundations, and my perpetual favorite, humane societies. But with the President now praising Michael Vick, and foreclosures turning animals into fallout from the financial crisis, I just work to keep my own five pets healthy and consider it enough karma payment.
I question the role these charities play in the betterment of our country or us. Do we have less cancer, diabetes or hunger due to these organizations’ efforts? Probably not. Do they fill a need in creating a class of employment (the nonprofit sector), that if not particularly well paying, usually offers good benefits? Probably. Do they make donors feel better? Absolutely.
But no nonprofit can substitute for what our government should offer – a true social safety net. The federal government should be coordinating research on the diseases that prey on us the most, not for treatments but for cures. With our abundant food supply, a well-run government should be able to shift the surplus to those who need it — rather than create surpluses of nonnutritive foods because those who make them lobby the most for subsidies. A state or local government that isn’t starved of resources should be able to assist those who need jobs in finding them. It also should be able to educate our population to be able to hold such jobs and to participate in our democracy with confidence. Yet our President and Congress extend the Bush tax cuts while needless wars go on.
Until our commentators and government abandon the Prop. 13-loving, middle-class tax cut-pandering, wealthy no-tax paying ideology, the nonprofits may be the only thin padding between the haves, the have-nots and chaos. But despite the American obsession with lowering our tax burden and the false ideology of the free market, do I really want to give to that?
Jessica Gadsden has been controversial since the day she discovered her inner soapbox. She excoriated the cheerleaders on the editorial page of her high school paper, transferred from a co-educational university to a women's college to protest the gender-biased curfew policy, published a newspaper in law school that raked the dean over the coals with (among other things) the headline, “Law School Supports Drug Use”—and that was before she got serious about speaking out. Progressive doesn't begin to define her political views. A reformed lawyer, she is a fulltime novelist who writes under a pseudonym, of course. A Brooklyn native, she divided her college years between Hampton University and Smith.
Ms. Gadsden’s essays appear every other Tuesday. She may be contacted at www.pennermag.com
