7 ms·

Charity: Who Cares? A Visual Guide to Giving

34 points by alexandros 17y ago

houseabsolute 17y ago
Interesting that this broke out the religious and secular giving. I've always heard the statistic that religious people giving more, but I always wondered if most of that was in tithes. Apparently it's not.
- DarkShikari 17y ago
  I've always heard the statistic that religious people giving more The statistic they showed was religious people being more likely to give at all: this doesn't say anything about how much they give, or the distribution of giving. It's dangerous to extrapolate too much from limited data.
  - houseabsolute 17y ago
    The statistic I have heard is that religious people give more in quantity, regardless of what this particular article shows.
  - walkon 17y ago
    There is the part that says "religious people give more to secular causes than secular people do." Then the stat: 71% of religious give to secular causes while 61% of secular people do.
- adriand 17y ago
  Religious people have more to answer for.
  - houseabsolute 17y ago
    Assuming you're not a religious person, I don't really understand how a concept of answering for anything fits in your world view (except on an emotional level, that I can understand completely). It's all just atoms, right? That aside, I haven't ever seen anything even resembling of well-constructed argument that religious people do less net good/more net harm to the world more than secular people.
    - thwarted 17y ago
      That aside, I haven't ever seen anything even resembling of well-constructed argument that religious people do less net good/more net harm to the world more than secular people. The stereotypical example is wars in the names of deities. However, there's also a burden of proof for the inverse of that on the religious people, specifically the anti-atheists, who claim that without God, we'd all be amoral and unethical, which they don't have arguments, well-constructed or not, for.
      - w00pla 17y ago
        > The stereotypical example is wars in the names of deities. Another stereotypical example is oppression and murder in the name of state atheism. > specifically the anti-atheists I've never met an anti-atheist. Yet social sites such as this or reddit.com seems filled with militant foaming-around-the-mouth atheists. I sincerely hope that the reddit trend doesn’t spread to ycnews.
      - houseabsolute 17y ago
        > specifically the anti-atheists I am not one of those. I think the Bible actually specifically teaches that this is not the case due to something called the "common grace." There's a Wikipedia article about it here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_grace http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_grace). You can pull that out next time you meet an anti-atheist from the Christian camp (although I have never met someone like that). Also the wars in the name of deities thing is bull. I am not a student of history, but in the secular school I attended growing up the history books typically taught that these wars were normally based on geopolitical aspirations. IF you believed the "wars in the name of deities" argument, you might be tempted to believe that Muslim extremism was the cause of recent terrorist bombings (buying into the "they hate our freedom" line of thought), but that too is false. Those bombing us are doing so because of specific actions that our country has taken against their people, like keeping military bases in Saudi Arabia, oppressing the people of Iran, and other things we have done.
        thwarted 17y ago
spamizbad 17y ago
Really wish they'd stop lumping in tithes in with legitimate charitable causes. It completely distorts the data.
- jmtulloss 17y ago
  Why? Giving to a church is generally considered a charitable cause.
  - pwmanagerdied 17y ago
    From his comment, I'd imagine he thinks that spreading lies and irrationality shouldn't qualify an entity as a charity.
    - jmtulloss 17y ago
      Churches do more than just spread their message, they also spread their money and effort around their community. I suspect that churches would have an expenditure breakdown similar to the "high administration" charities, with low costs of fund raising.
- 3pt14159 17y ago
  My church feeds the homeless in Toronto, helps run a rehab clinic in Russia, and sends food and medical supplies to Haiti. Yes we do spend money on keeping on the lights and teaching our congregation about lessons from the Bible, but I've never even heard of the Pastor ever supporting a particular bill or politician. Maybe its because I'm Canadian.
  - roundsquare 17y ago
    Your church may or may not be a great example, I'm not sure. In part, the issue revolves around if people know what their tithes are going for and why they tithe. E.g. if they know the money is going to help starving kids (or whatever charity) and they give for that reason, then it makes sense to count tithes (or a percent of tithes?). If they would give tithes no matter what because they are supposed to, then it probably doesn't make sense to count them (at least if you are trying to analyze who is the most giving based on money spent or percentage of income, whatever).
freetard 17y ago
If giving to charity includes supporting the local church to promote prop 8 like laws, then I'm not impressed. And given that religious donation make up for 35% of all, it is actually kind of scary. Countries like France are much less religious so it makes sense that donation there (to religious institutions and in general) are lower, plus, if you take out the few US billionaires there, I wonder if the French actually give less than the Americans. Also note that French and Italians and most European countries pay much more taxes than the Americans do, and donation are not as tax deductible in Europe as in the US. You can also consider taxes to be some kind of charity, in France, minimum wage is huge and people who are unemployed get almost minimum wage like compensation + health care. So you can consider that in Europe, the state takes care of charity while in the US, it is taken care of by the people (with little success for health care).
- jordanb 17y ago
  A donation to Catholic Charities would count as a religious donation although 0% if it will go to the Church's political activities. A great deal of the aid to the needy in the US is provided by religious-affiliated charities. Heck, even the Salvation Army is a religious charity. But I think you're right that the structure of a country like France allows it to run on less charitable giving. I would imagine that the welfare state eliminates the need for a lot of food kitchens and shelters, for instance. American numbers are also inflated by a large number of organizations operating as 501c3s and collecting contributions that would not be considered "Charities" by most people. For instance, the second largest 'purpose' grouping for 501c3s is "education".[1] Is Harvard University really a 'charity?' Notice that the largest purpose grouping (by revenue) is health care. I know that Advocate Healthcare -- one of the largest hospital chains in Chicago -- is a 501c3 which has been attacked by health reform advocates for being very stingy with charity care and engaging in aggressive billing practices. The "healthcare" segment is over 52% of the 501c3 sector by revenue. Some of that may be charity clinics, but I imagine the vast majority of it is institutions like Advocate. If you combine the healtchare and education segments, they account for over 71% of the entire sector. [1] http://nccsdataweb.urban.org/PubApps/nonprofit-overview-sumRpt.php?v=nteeFilers&t=pc&f=0 http://nccsdataweb.urban.org/PubApps/nonprofit-overview-sumR...
zck 17y ago
I have two quibbles with their numbers. First, if WalMart gives 1% of revenues, and they have $400 billion in revenues, they give $4 billion to charity. They say $13 billion is given to charity by corporations. Note that U.S. GDP is $14 trillion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States), so WalMart takes in under 3% of that. It seems off that 30% of all charitable giving by corporations is high for one organization. Also, it says that public charities "collect a total of " more than $1.4 trillion. But we only give $300 billion to charity. Where does the other $1.1 trillion come from?

34 points by alexandros 17y ago

Interesting that this broke out the religious and secular giving. I've always heard the statistic that religious people giving more, but I always wondered if most of that was in tithes. Apparently it's not.

DarkShikari 17y ago
I've always heard the statistic that religious people giving more The statistic they showed was religious people being more likely to give at all: this doesn't say anything about how much they give, or the distribution of giving. It's dangerous to extrapolate too much from limited data.
- houseabsolute 17y ago
  The statistic I have heard is that religious people give more in quantity, regardless of what this particular article shows.
- walkon 17y ago
  There is the part that says "religious people give more to secular causes than secular people do." Then the stat: 71% of religious give to secular causes while 61% of secular people do.
adriand 17y ago
Religious people have more to answer for.
- houseabsolute 17y ago
  Assuming you're not a religious person, I don't really understand how a concept of answering for anything fits in your world view (except on an emotional level, that I can understand completely). It's all just atoms, right? That aside, I haven't ever seen anything even resembling of well-constructed argument that religious people do less net good/more net harm to the world more than secular people.
  - thwarted 17y ago
    That aside, I haven't ever seen anything even resembling of well-constructed argument that religious people do less net good/more net harm to the world more than secular people. The stereotypical example is wars in the names of deities. However, there's also a burden of proof for the inverse of that on the religious people, specifically the anti-atheists, who claim that without God, we'd all be amoral and unethical, which they don't have arguments, well-constructed or not, for.
    - w00pla 17y ago
      > The stereotypical example is wars in the names of deities. Another stereotypical example is oppression and murder in the name of state atheism. > specifically the anti-atheists I've never met an anti-atheist. Yet social sites such as this or reddit.com seems filled with militant foaming-around-the-mouth atheists. I sincerely hope that the reddit trend doesn’t spread to ycnews.
    - houseabsolute 17y ago
      > specifically the anti-atheists I am not one of those. I think the Bible actually specifically teaches that this is not the case due to something called the "common grace." There's a Wikipedia article about it here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_grace http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_grace). You can pull that out next time you meet an anti-atheist from the Christian camp (although I have never met someone like that). Also the wars in the name of deities thing is bull. I am not a student of history, but in the secular school I attended growing up the history books typically taught that these wars were normally based on geopolitical aspirations. IF you believed the "wars in the name of deities" argument, you might be tempted to believe that Muslim extremism was the cause of recent terrorist bombings (buying into the "they hate our freedom" line of thought), but that too is false. Those bombing us are doing so because of specific actions that our country has taken against their people, like keeping military bases in Saudi Arabia, oppressing the people of Iran, and other things we have done.
      - thwarted 17y ago

spamizbad 17y ago

Really wish they'd stop lumping in tithes in with legitimate charitable causes. It completely distorts the data.

jmtulloss 17y ago
Why? Giving to a church is generally considered a charitable cause.
- pwmanagerdied 17y ago
  From his comment, I'd imagine he thinks that spreading lies and irrationality shouldn't qualify an entity as a charity.
  - jmtulloss 17y ago
    Churches do more than just spread their message, they also spread their money and effort around their community. I suspect that churches would have an expenditure breakdown similar to the "high administration" charities, with low costs of fund raising.
3pt14159 17y ago
My church feeds the homeless in Toronto, helps run a rehab clinic in Russia, and sends food and medical supplies to Haiti. Yes we do spend money on keeping on the lights and teaching our congregation about lessons from the Bible, but I've never even heard of the Pastor ever supporting a particular bill or politician. Maybe its because I'm Canadian.
- roundsquare 17y ago
  Your church may or may not be a great example, I'm not sure. In part, the issue revolves around if people know what their tithes are going for and why they tithe. E.g. if they know the money is going to help starving kids (or whatever charity) and they give for that reason, then it makes sense to count tithes (or a percent of tithes?). If they would give tithes no matter what because they are supposed to, then it probably doesn't make sense to count them (at least if you are trying to analyze who is the most giving based on money spent or percentage of income, whatever).

freetard 17y ago

If giving to charity includes supporting the local church to promote prop 8 like laws, then I'm not impressed. And given that religious donation make up for 35% of all, it is actually kind of scary. Countries like France are much less religious so it makes sense that donation there (to religious institutions and in general) are lower, plus, if you take out the few US billionaires there, I wonder if the French actually give less than the Americans. Also note that French and Italians and most European countries pay much more taxes than the Americans do, and donation are not as tax deductible in Europe as in the US. You can also consider taxes to be some kind of charity, in France, minimum wage is huge and people who are unemployed get almost minimum wage like compensation + health care. So you can consider that in Europe, the state takes care of charity while in the US, it is taken care of by the people (with little success for health care).

jordanb 17y ago
A donation to Catholic Charities would count as a religious donation although 0% if it will go to the Church's political activities. A great deal of the aid to the needy in the US is provided by religious-affiliated charities. Heck, even the Salvation Army is a religious charity. But I think you're right that the structure of a country like France allows it to run on less charitable giving. I would imagine that the welfare state eliminates the need for a lot of food kitchens and shelters, for instance. American numbers are also inflated by a large number of organizations operating as 501c3s and collecting contributions that would not be considered "Charities" by most people. For instance, the second largest 'purpose' grouping for 501c3s is "education".[1] Is Harvard University really a 'charity?' Notice that the largest purpose grouping (by revenue) is health care. I know that Advocate Healthcare -- one of the largest hospital chains in Chicago -- is a 501c3 which has been attacked by health reform advocates for being very stingy with charity care and engaging in aggressive billing practices. The "healthcare" segment is over 52% of the 501c3 sector by revenue. Some of that may be charity clinics, but I imagine the vast majority of it is institutions like Advocate. If you combine the healtchare and education segments, they account for over 71% of the entire sector. [1] http://nccsdataweb.urban.org/PubApps/nonprofit-overview-sumRpt.php?v=nteeFilers&t=pc&f=0 http://nccsdataweb.urban.org/PubApps/nonprofit-overview-sumR...

zck 17y ago

I have two quibbles with their numbers. First, if WalMart gives 1% of revenues, and they have $400 billion in revenues, they give $4 billion to charity. They say $13 billion is given to charity by corporations. Note that U.S. GDP is $14 trillion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States), so WalMart takes in under 3% of that. It seems off that 30% of all charitable giving by corporations is high for one organization. Also, it says that public charities "collect a total of " more than $1.4 trillion. But we only give $300 billion to charity. Where does the other $1.1 trillion come from?