this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2024
733 points (96.5% liked)

Science Memes

10348 readers
2549 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.



Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.


Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
733
Malaria (fedia.io)
submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago (2 children)

So imagine there exists a charitable billionaire that wants to do good. How in your eyes would a billionaire go about donating their money without drawing this same criticism?

Hasn't Gates already pledged pretty much his entire fortune to charity after he dies?

I guess the Devil's advocate argument here is would you rather trust Bill Gate's charity to spend the money or the US Government? Because from what I've seen, any time there is excess money in the US government it is not spent on social programs but on enriching government contractors and tax breaks for the wealthy.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

They could use their money and influence to lobby the government in a positive direction, such as making sure taxes go toward social programs instead of killing brown people, and then simultaneously help fund that by filing their taxes fairly and paying their intended share rather than do this arcane skullfuckery to pay as little as possible. A great next step would be to lobby for tax code reform to close the arcane loopholes (and ofc massively raise taxes on anyone with an income north if $1M/yr) so that other, less charitably minded billionaires can start paying their fair share too, whether they want to or not.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

So imagine there exists a charitable billionaire that wants to do good. How in your eyes would a billionaire go about donating their money without drawing this same criticism?

I'd say the answer to that, is that they should simply give significantly more than what they're currently giving. We're talking of people who could easily give away 99% of their wealth with 0 personal sacrifices. If they're giving less than 0.1%¹ instead, I just want to know why?

I found this webpage extremely helpful for putting into perspective just how much good they could be doing: https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/

¹) That number probably needs to be a lot smaller, but I don't want to make any claims.