It was the winter of 2010 and Mark Zuckerberg was in a hurry. A few months earlier, 40 of America's richest families had signed the Giving Pledge, a public promise initiated by Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett to give at least half of their wealth to charitable causes. Death was the Giving Pledge deadline. You could give half your money away beforehand, or you could leave it to charity in your will.
Zuckerberg has transferred more than $1 billion in stock to one of the tax code's dodgiest philanthropic vehicles, known as a donor-advised fund. The tax benefit offered by DAFs sounds almost too good to be true: Put money or stock or other assets in the fund, take an immediate income tax write-off of up to 30% of your adjusted gross income, and then donate the money … whenever.
Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan promised to give 99% of their wealth for charity. Five years later, they've given away 6%.The philanthropic landscape began to shift in the late 1960s. Congress capped charitable deductions against income, and required private foundations to submit detailed annual reports and spend at least 5% of their assets each year on grants and operating expenses.
One quirk of the tax code is that all those gifts are treated equally. It doesn't matter if your money winds up paying for a portrait of Donald Trump, an elliptical machine at Princeton, or mosquito nets for African children. All the tax code cares about is the value of the gift and the tax status of the organization that receives it.
John Arnold, a billionaire financier who was among the original Giving Pledge signers, told me that even donors with good intentions often wind up missing their own deadlines."There can be a gap between intent and action," he said."People worry that their giving is not going to be effective. Human nature is, 'I'll figure it out tomorrow.
thisisinsider Taxation over philanthropy
Wow.... It's a wonderful world we are in !
I have an idea! What if they pay taxes to support the infrastructure that made it possible for them to make their billions. I mean 42%
BITech
Call a spade a spade. Liar liar
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