Raise Taxes on Rich to Reward True Job Creators: Nick Hanauer

[mrstickball]

Mr Khan said:

mrstickball said:

bannedagain said:

You say that you will help someone because 'thats what America is about'. Let me ask you: When was the last time that YOU physically helped another person. Not through taxes, but through your own money or work?

That would be economically non-productive. Most efficient is to empower individuals who specialize in aiding others. So long as you don't breed a huge bureaucracy by the wayside, of course...

And the best way for that to happen is to have a lot of capital available to invest in non-profit and charitable organizations. As Kasz has said, you additionally need a lot of unskilled volunteer labor to do a lot of work for charities. In the case of government welfare, these people are paid $25+/hr between wages and benefits. With private charities, the labor is usually donated.

Here's an anecdotal story for you from my time working with a private charity. My church founded a food pantry, because one of the ladies had retired and wanted to make it the rest of her life's work to help those who wanted/needed food. She donated her time along with many others that helped out once or twice a week (including myself). The church paid all bills associated with the pantry - about $500/mo.

From that $500/mo plus volunteer work, the pantry fed about 800 people a month with food from the local food bank. Comparatively, our local government food authority fed about 1/2 as many people on a budget well over $20,000/mo. So we were doing twice the work on 1/40th the budget. Why? About 10 people donated 5 hours of work a week, and one person donated 20 hours of work a week.

Additionally, the current church I am at has a clothing center, food pantry, and homeless shelter. They are doing almost as much work as the entire government welfare agency in my county in those areas. The government entity gets about $50,000/mo for said activities. The shelter's total expenses for all three areas is about $3,000/mo. So again, that private charity is doing the same amount of work for about 1/20th the cost because its mostly volunteer work and the overhead is minimal.

More of this type of activity is desireable. How do you encourage it? Drop tax rates for all people to free up capital, and reform regulations to ensure charities can continue work unabated.