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The U.S. government (federal and state) spend more than $10T annually. By comparison, the top 1% wealthy Americans combined donate about 1% of that amount ($100B) annually.

Furthermore, government spending is ostensibly in the hands of the people via our elected representatives. It took me about 15 seconds to Google the San Francisco city budget and see that the city plans to spend $200M(!) on the city's public library this year.

We are not at the mercy of rich people we don't control. Instead, we are at the mercy of the people we elect, who we do control. As things should be.

Sadly, we just don't seem to care very much as a populace. Government budget breakdowns don't make headlines, whereas information about the spending habits of the rich tend to capture our imaginations.

It's also worth nothing that in his prime Bill Gates was not the philanthropist he is today. He "retired" into it. I'm not sure why people have expected Musk, Bezos, etc. to do in their primes what Bill Gates is doing in his retirement.

Comparing government expenditures on infrastructure (roads, bridges, sewers, power grids, schools, libraries), and earned benefits (social security, medicare) with a "charitable foundation's donations" can only be seen as disingenuous. Please don't insult us with this sort of sophistry.

Anything can be compared. In fact, you may be surprised to learn that the entire point of the word "compare" is to point out similarities between otherwise dissimilar things.

Well, yes, it's true that the Milky Way could be compared to a sardine sandwich. As has been noted, that comparison would be disingenuous.

Both the Milky Way and sardine sandwiches are visible objects.

That's a comparison that's not disingenuous.

If you're going to label a comparison as disingenuous, the onus is on you to provide a reason why. Otherwise, you're being unreasonable.

>Both the Milky Way and sardine sandwiches are visible objects.

Sure. Aside from that? I'm trying very very hard to not be pedantic, but you are making that difficult. Thing is, comparing incompatible items is disingenuous.

Another consideration is that Federal, state, and local tax collection currently stands at approximately 40% of US GDP for the US.

This puts a natural upper limit on how much the government can just raise revenue and simply do. Eventually people need to consider not revenue, but instead what they want the government to prioritize, and how efficiently it does it.

I find that most people are in disbelief when they hear this Stat because they think in terms of individual tax rates and not serial multiplication. Take a widget company by way of example. It produces a widget which it sells for profit. Company pays corporate income tax, then passes the rest on to investors who pay income or capital gains tax again. The investor then uses that income to pay sales taxes on anything they buy as well as property taxes and miscellaneous fees.

If a billionaire avoids taxes by giving the money to charity, in a “net gain, net loss” kind of way, doesn’t that mean the public tax-payers are effectively paying the charity? I.e. by missing out on the tax the government would have collected.

So then if the billionaire owns the charity and they are holding the money as assets on the balance sheet, then the public has effectively paid the billionaire right?

> If a billionaire avoids taxes by giving the money to charity, in a “net gain, net loss” kind of way, doesn’t that mean the public tax-payers are effectively paying the charity? I.e. by missing out on the tax the government would have collected.

Yea, as usual, the public gets the worst of both worlds: They partially pay for the charity (through loss of tax revenue) and also have no control over what the charity funds.

The math is that you're donating around 2.5x to 5x what you save in written off income / taxes, so there's a built in multiplier

Opportunity cost is very different than actual cost, and even further from net loss. It has to do with what the null situation is.

The government could net more money if it sent the army house to house and collected all the valuables, but choosing not to do so isn't costing it money, and it certainly isn't paying those people.

When it comes to US charities, it seems most people dont understand how tax deductions work. Long term capital gains rate are 20% of income. A billionaire pays $1 less taxes for every $5 they donate. So as long as charities are >20% as effective as government, the public is better off with a $5 charitable donation than collecting the $1 in taxes.

> A billionaire pays $1 less taxes for every $5 they donate. So as long as charities are >20% as effective as government, the public is better off with a $5 charitable donation than collecting the $1 in taxes.

Only if the public's good is aligned with where the donation is going.

Yes, at least 20% to break even.

That depends on whether you think government expenditures are tethered to tax revenue.

Technically, the billionaire paid himself instead of the public.

It's like the Howard Hughes endowment or whatever it's called. He invented this trick

I would look harder at what companies bill and the waltons are invested in. I would be really surprised if they didn't own startups/other companies that directly benefit from their charitable endeavors.

there is nothing lucky about having Bill Gates control the massive monopoly rents he collected from us, rents that came at the cost of weakening and holding back (through artificially high prices) progress in microcomputers, a vital and nascent part of our industrial infrastructure.

And maybe billions spent swatting mosquitoes in fever swamps overseas is not the best public policy objective for us, so perhaps his tax deductions should not be able to now divert (through huge deductions) huge quantities of our taxes paid to his pet projects without any democratic consideration.

How much of the money from Bill gates comes in the form of Microsoft windows and office licenses though? not that that makes his philanthropy a bad thing, but there's still a element of self dealing there. Then again, I'm sure he can get a discount for those licenses, so maybe it comes out as better in the end?

Currently it's less self dealing that you probably assume. The global heath stuff is well outside Microsoft's core business.

A percentage of grants from the gates foundation gets spent on access to technology for low income people. But quite a bit of it has been spent on Chromebooks etc not just windows devices.

Though earlier when MS had a more dominate market position spending on access to technology more directly translated into buying MS software.

Oh cool, that’s good to know. My thoughts here are dated back to when Microsoft was the only option and Chromebooks didn’t exist. Seems like that’s changed so there’s less self dealing then

Gates has been largely divested from Microsoft for a very long time.

> You can get lucky and have Bill Gates steering the money, providing infectious disease research

Actually Bill Gate's research all goes towards creating more intellectual property he can profit off of. It is an investment strategy with great PR, but is not in fact pure philanthropy. It is philanthrocapitalism. This is why Gates led the push to make sure the covid vaccines were not open source. Despite the millions of lives it could have saved or improved around the world, the opportunity for profit won out over the needs of the global population.

Vandana Shiva co-authored a report critical of Gate's work, if you want to learn more: https://navdanyainternational.org/publications/report-synthe...

We have a say in how the government spends our tax dollars? This is news to me. I would prefer that much less be spent on war and military, among other things.

You might, but your fellow citizens might not. That’s kind of the point right?

Sadly most people don’t even vote for issues anymore. They just vote along party lines.

That is the choice that is given to them. Despite all the technology we have for direct communication, data analysis etc, you cannot vote for issues individually, only personalities who if your lucky might follow through on one of their promises about an issue you care about but mostly just politick and look out for their party, themselves and their backers interest. You can't really blame people for not getting involved when that is the state of play. Politics is essentially a game show on the surface and nepotism and self-interest underneath.

The nicest trick the ruling class pulled off was convincing people that election = democracy.

> This seems to be one of the pitfalls of setting up our society such that philanthropy funds the public good as opposed to taxes and government

Governments suffer from similar issues though. They can and do use your money for all sorts of bad things, even in democratic countries.

Very true. But, at least if the government is democratic, then the public has (at least in theory, maybe not so much in practice) the ability to vote for one that will direct the money in the direction the public would like the money to go. When it's a private individual, the public cannot do this. You could have the entire country disagreeing with what Philanthropist X donates their money to, and it doesn't matter. There is no way to stop him.