I consider Gates to be “better” than most billionaires, but, I recognize that he’s still a billionaire, and as such, his philanthropic endeavors are as much about him having wealth and maintaining his wealth as they are about him being a “good person”.
Let me explain: it’s a tax write off. Basically, billionaires often donate to charity, not because they’re particularly giving, but because it reduces their taxes. They basically take the money they would otherwise pay in tax, and instead pay it to a charity that then does whatever they do with it.
By establishing a charity for himself, he can personally pay his charity the money that would otherwise go to tax, then as the charity, dictate where those funds are spent. Instead of giving the money to someone else to do with as they will, he basically pays himself, so he can dictate what happens with his money.
In turn, he pays little to no taxes, and only has to ensure the money circles around his charity somehow. That may be in the form of paying himself (or others) as a function of running the charity, or sending the money to places and people who he believes can benefit from it (or indirectly, benefit him).
It becomes a large circle jerk of money that otherwise would have gone to the government for taxes.
EDIT: before this gets any worse: he’s not making money with tax write-offs. That’s literally impossible. The point is to control where your money goes. Here’s an example. In situation A, bill, the individual, wants a thing to happen… Say, it’s research into a new form of energy. So Bill takes $1000 from his gross income and pays someone to research that thing to make it a reality. At the end of the year, bill gets a knock on the door, it’s the tax man, looking for his cut off the $1000 bill earned. His cut is 30% or $300. Now let’s move to situation B. Bill wants the thing to happen, but Bill owns a charity. So Bill donates the money to his charity and gets a tax write off for it in the form of a receipt that he can submit later. As a representative of the charity, bill then pays that $1000 to people to make the thing. At the end of the year, the tax man comes calling for his $300 of bills income. Instead, bill hands the tax collector the receipt for the charitable donation he made with the $1000 of income. The tax man accepts it and leaves with nothing.
The charity is a tax shelter so that bill has more money available to spend on the things he wants to have happen. So more of his money can go towards those things without being taxed.
I hope that clears it up a bit. Jesus, there’s a lot of people here that don’t understand tax write-offs. There’s more that simply don’t understand me, or have literacy issues, and assume far too much about what I’m saying here. Yikes.
I’m convinced no one on Lemmy or Reddit knows what a tax break actually is or that YOU DON’T MAKE MONEY FROM THEM!
I’ve come to the same conclusion. Every time there’s a corporation or billionaire either scrapping something or giving something away, then it’s “for the tax breaks”.
Let you explain? That’s literally not how taxes work. Who falls for this shit?
The number of people who don’t understand the difference between a tax deduction and a tax credit is too damn high.
I’m not sure what you mean, since money you donate to charity is exempt from income tax. The taxes you would otherwise pay on income that you donate is refunded to you.
deleted by creator
They could use their money and influence to lobby the government in a positive direction, such as making sure taxes go toward social programs instead of killing brown people, and then simultaneously help fund that by filing their taxes fairly and paying their intended share rather than do this arcane skullfuckery to pay as little as possible. A great next step would be to lobby for tax code reform to close the arcane loopholes (and ofc massively raise taxes on anyone with an income north if $1M/yr) so that other, less charitably minded billionaires can start paying their fair share too, whether they want to or not.
So imagine there exists a charitable billionaire that wants to do good. How in your eyes would a billionaire go about donating their money without drawing this same criticism?
I’d say the answer to that, is that they should simply give significantly more than what they’re currently giving. We’re talking of people who could easily give away 99% of their wealth with 0 personal sacrifices. If they’re giving less than 0.1%¹ instead, I just want to know why?
I found this webpage extremely helpful for putting into perspective just how much good they could be doing: https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/
¹) That number probably needs to be a lot smaller, but I don’t want to make any claims.
Removed by mod
deleted by creator
He also held on to that COVID vaccine
He fucking did! Why the downvotes? He personally lobbied governments to make sure nobody released the patents to allow cheap vaccinations in developing countries
Gates got a bunch of defenders for some reason
some people like to join the winning team. It makes them feel like winnners themselves.
I guess it doesn’t fit the good billionaire narrative
deleted by creator
It wasn’t “lower income countries not having access to the vaccine”. It was just preventing them from making it. They can have subsidized access to high quality vaccines.
India wanted to manufacturer the vaccine in less than ideal factories. That would have hurt or killed some of the people who took it, and the vaccine would have been blamed. This is the literal reason why they said “no”. They fucking invented the vaccine. They would know.
I hate mosquitos. All my homies hate mosquitos.
The poor also experience gun violence in Minecraft
deleted by creator
- There’s no good billionaires
- Bill Gates is not any kind of exception
- Even in comparison to other living billionaires
deleted by creator
His company has also doomed some billions of people to using Excel, but on the other hand some number of millions of people get the pleasure of using Excel
Maybe, but that’s clearly not his intention as he has showed many times.
Take for example case covid
In April 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Gates was criticized for suggesting that pharmaceutical companies should hold onto patents for COVID-19 vaccines. The criticism came due to the possibility of this preventing poorer nations from obtaining adequate vaccines. Tara Van Ho of the University of Essex stated, “Gates speaks as if all the lives being lost in India are inevitable but eventually the West will help when in reality the US & UK are holding their feet on the neck of developing states by refusing to break [intellectual property rights] protections. It’s disgusting.”
Gates is opposed to the TRIPS waiver. Bloomberg News reported him as saying he argued that Oxford University should not give away the rights to its COVID-19 information, as it had announced, but instead sell it to a single industry partner, as it did. His views on the value of legal monopolies in medicine have been linked to his views on legal monopolies in software
Still probably a net positive, though. Hell, he could kill 110 Million people added to every sars-cov-2 death combined and still be net positive. Good person? Debatably no. Best billionaire? Yeah.
That’s one stupid argument backed with made up numbers there
Covid19 has killed less than 8 Million people total, and you can argue in good faith that Bill Gates would be responsible for some of those deaths by advocating for full commercialization of the vaccine.
Yeah, it’s a lot, but compared to a random estimate from The Guardian of 122 Million lives saved by the Gates Foundation… yeah.
Now, I realize some people would say saving any number of lives wouldn’t justify murder, but anybody who says Bill Gates is anything other than a net positive impact on the world is out of their fucking head.
Some people would say that he has given negative 130 billion, or whatever his net worth is right now
I wouldn’t go that extreme, but still think he has had net negative effect in the world
deleted by creator
It’s easier to just assume all billionaires are evil. The chances of it being wrong is about the same as for any good person to become a billionaire
deleted by creator
Yeah obviously. I’m not saying an evil person cannot do good things, Hitler was responsible for VW Beetle - objectively one of the most beautiful cars in human history. We just can’t call Hitler a good person because of that one thing
Charity is the oligarchy picking the winners.
