101–110 of 301 posts
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probably the money is more wisely spent by the private institution than the government.
The argument usually is that by donating your money to a charity that you control instead of paying taxes you effectively undermine democracy.
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Andrew Carnegie was the OG give-all-my-wealth-away-before-I-die incredibly wealthy person. I read an essay by him in high school where he though, philosophically, he shouldn't give his money to his kids rather than donate it.
Famous for a library in every town- over 2500 of them. Many still operating.
Instead of using the money to research renewable or more efficient energy production, reduce pollution etc his foundation uses the money for vaccines and health services which surprisingly has as target, as he says in a ted video (link below), to decrease human population which he sees it as the major problem of today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaF-fq2Zn7I&t=278&cc_load_po... "The world today has about 6.8 bill…
That's incorrect. Gates has dedicated vast sums of money, over more than a decade, to energy research and has openly and frequently stated that dramatic energy breakthroughs are among the most important goals he or anyone can have to further humanity.
http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/environment/bill-ga...
http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-talks-private-nucl...
http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-interview-energy-m...
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It is the mythical man-month applied to charity. It takes time to get results, adding more money doesn't help. Nobody wants that much cash in one lump sum, they want an anual income. If you give me my anual income (including benifits and supplies) and I can quit my current job to do charity work. If instead you were to give me a billion dollars, I can still quit my job to do charity work, but this time I'll be doing…
Hmm I think it's probably better to get the lump sum and operate off interest. Even 1% of $50 billion yearly is $500 million. I think the foundation could manage to exist off that.
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What!? Do you realize what the foundation does with the money? They aren't spending the money on vacation homes for Bill & Melinda. They are spending on eradicating malaria and stuff like that. You know, good things for the world. How is this a tax scheme?
It's the precedent, really. Donate $1B, and only $100M is used for the actual solution of the problem while $900M sits accumulating more wealth. The vacation home comes 7-8 years later, after the money has been "washed" a few times. This would be like me automating commits at a startup with some hardcoded boilerplate commit messages to make it look like I was working the full "expected" day while in actuality, I was…
I'm surprised that people are asking how / why he is giving money away and no one mentioned his Giving Pledge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Giving_Pledge Bill Gates and Warren Buffet pledged to give half of their net worth away during their life or death to charity. They're practicing what they preach.
it's capitalism at is best you start a company in your garage take it to be worth Bilions an then give it all away, doesn't get better than this.
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I don't understand why you were down-voted for asking an honest question. Here's an up-vote to encourage fair play.
+1. I often have anti-pg approach opinions that I think got me on some sort of "downvote him" list. Also my upvote doesn't seem to work. First I had impression myself, then asked fellow HNer to see if I'm wrong and my downvote for his comments didn't go through. Thanks for upvote though.
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probably the money is more wisely spent by the private institution than the government.
The argument usually is that by donating your money to a charity that you control instead of paying taxes you effectively undermine democracy.
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Cascade's investments are roughly 1/2 of his wealth. Bloomberg is currently estimating he's sitting on $43 billion in cash. https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/profiles/william-h-ga...
Honest question: can half of it for example $20B in cash, cure cancer? or HIV/AIDS?
Great progress right now: https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/treatment/research/car-t...
The total money spent on cancer is bigger than 20B though.
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The argument usually is that by donating your money to a charity that you control instead of paying taxes you effectively undermine democracy.
The majority of federal income tax receipts go to military spending [+] (ignore social security and healthcare, those are funded out of compulsory payroll taxes, which is distinct from federal income tax); you're doing more social good (in general) by diverting wealth to charities that promote social welfare than giving that money to the federal government (I'm sad to say). Sometimes democracy is wrong. More social p…