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It's weird that corporations have philanthropic arms, isn't it?

• babyshake 4y ago
  It's mostly just tax avoidance, right?
  • IgorPartola 4y ago
    The way I understand it is that Amazon offers an affiliate fee to affiliates. When you don’t go through an affiliate they get to keep the small percentage. Smile was basically Amazon’s own affiliate program that paid out to NGOs. It did reduce their tax liability but it’s not like it’s free money. Assuming a corporate rate of 15%, when Amazon pays a charity $100, they save $15 on taxes. That mean they spent $85, so not exactly tax avoidance unless the charity they donate to is also owned by Amazon or some such.
  • waynesonfire 4y ago
    or a talking point. government and business work very closely together and when these two negotiate, the government likes to see philanthropy.
  • tpmoney 4y ago
    Only in the sense that money that would have been taxed as income was instead paid to charities. Simplified example, they took in $200 and paid $50 of that to a charity. At 10% they paid $15 in taxes instead of $20. If you think charities are overall a net positive (and especially if you think they’re more efficient at getting money to the right places than the government) a loss of $5 in government revenue for $50 into charities seems like a good deal
  • Rebelgecko 4y ago
    How so? Taxable income is pretty much always better than 0 income
  • stevenwoo 4y ago
    There's a comment on reddit by someone who claimed to be working on this when it was started - the entire program was to avoid paying money to Google for searches resulting in sales on Amazon, by making Amazon the first place to go instead of Google. https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/10ft5iv/amazon_discontinues_charity_donation_program_amid/j4znb8y/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/10ft5iv/amazon_...
• FearlessNebula 4y ago
  It’s just whitewashing
• criddell 4y ago
  Not really. Most charities are themselves corporations.
• vkou 4y ago
  No weirder than having marketing arms.
• tpmoney 4y ago
  Why? Corporations are made up of people, and people have causes they want to be charitable towards. If you’re going to be bringing in millions of dollars anyway, why not pay some of that out to causes you believe in. It’s only weird if you assume all corporations should be amoral money exchange systems where by money is exchanged for labor and capital which in turn is exchanged for more money
  • pasquinelli 4y ago
    > Corporations are made up of people, and people have causes they want to be charitable towards. almost none of the people that make up a corporation are free to decide where money goes. the few people that do take the money out, the board of directors or whatever, could just donate their own money to whatever charity.
    • criddell 4y ago
      Most of the corporations in the US are pretty small. When a local plumbing company in your community sponsors a neighborhood little league team, there probably isn't much discussion on that company's board of directors about the donation. https://www.statista.com/statistics/487741/number-of-firms-in-the-us-by-employment-size/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/487741/number-of-firms-i...
  • philwelch 4y ago
    > It’s only weird if you assume all corporations should be amoral money exchange systems where by money is exchanged for labor and capital which in turn is exchanged for more money What you’re missing is the final step in the chain, which is the part where profits are distributed to shareholders. If I’m one of those shareholders, I might very well take a large chunk of those dividends and donate the money to charity. But instead of paying me more of those dividends to donate to my preferred cause, the company’s management has decided that they should be the ones donating my money to their preferred cause. Aside from that, it’s just a failure of specialization. Philanthropy is hard, making money is hard, and building a single organization that does a good job at either of them is even harder. I’d rather have corporations that focused on doing a really good job at whatever they did and non-profits that do whatever they do as efficiently as possible, rather than a corporation trying to do both.
• Symmetry 4y ago
  If they can get people buying stuff on Amazon to type the URL into their browser instead of searching for "Amazon" in google and clicking the add that pops up they probably save more money than it costs them.
• karaterobot 4y ago
  Never struck me as weird. Trying to think of why you find it to be so. Is it because it theoretically distracts them from pursuing their profit motive with a "total war" mentality? I don't believe that's actually true (either that they have that mentality or that charity is a net loss for them).
• fwungy 4y ago
  A lot of what NGOs, foundations, and other philanthropic organizations do is seek to mold things in some way that is beneficial to the founders with tax advantaged money. Rich people don't get rich by giving their money away randomly. For example, if Bill Gates didn't start the Gates Foundation his money would have been highly taxed, and he would have lost control of it. By starting the Gates Foundation he keeps control of that money, and he can use the foundation to steer policy in ways that are beneficial to him.
• bastardoperator 4y ago
  I was told corporations are people, so no.. not really.