Well, citing only the administrative costs of the programs themselves isn’t very convincing either. A charity counts ALL costs of operating as overhead. Supporters of activist government only count the administrative costs of the program, rather than including the cost of the government itself. And then there’s fraud, which is why administrative costs are so low. If you aren’t hunting fraud, then of course it won’t cost much to just push money out the door.
Didja notice that he linked to a Washington Post article which rates a Michele Bachmann statement about 70/30 as being “four Pinocchios?” In the explanation of what that means, the WaPo states that such statements with that ratings are “Whoppers,” as in the most egregious misrepresentations or errors. It’s totally bizarre for someone to support their research by pointing someone to a fact-check article which concludes they are totally wrong.
Don’t you find this very odd?
Not at all the article exposes the misuse and misunderstanding of his paper. But as a libertarian I get the impression he is not for the government having much to do with private charity. Which includes my own proposal. I get that impression from this link. http://www.cato.org/pubs/briefs/bp-062es.html
I however am willing to draw the line at “You have to give 10% of your income to charity” and then let you have the choice on how to do that rather than force you to give to charities with .gov after their web address. The element of record keeping is so politicians who have made promises can point to the charity received by the poor as counting toward the fulfillment of their promised obligations. It is also for enforcement. This get politician off the hook for promises they can’t keep and provides accounting for the funds they are not receiving directly. This is a replacement to the social programs and their funding. However if you would still like to donate your funds to one of these organization you are still welcome to. And you are alway welcome to give above and beyond what it required of you. I have personally worked in charity teams that also had doctors, dentists, and nurses that paid their own way and provided free services to the poor. Pretty much all the charity work that I have done I had to pay my own expenses and for the people I was helping while working long hours helping out. This is the nature of private charity.
This is a rather naive approach. Do you think that cancelling Medicare would result in smaller or cheaper Senate?
Preventing fraud is all about the low-hanging fruit. You can, in theory, catch every case of fraud, but you will end up spending more money that you save. Instead, you focus on simple cases that can be prevented/discovered at low cost. And here large agencies with uniform policies have an advantage. Large agencies spending 1% of their budget on fraud prevention will get a much greater return than small agencies.
Private companies figure out what the sweet spot is. The government has a whole different set of incentives, none of them conducive to being good stewards of taxpayer money.
Coupla thoughts:
On the question of energy and matter, the Laws of Thermodynamics can, broadly, be summed up in three assertions:
- You can’t win.
- You can’t break even.
- You can’t get out of the game.
If one is inclined to apply these summings-up to economic systems, it can be argued that:
- Capitalism is based on the assumption that you can win.
- Communism is based on the assumption that you can break even.
- Libertarianism is based on the assumption that you can get out of the game.
When I first heard this, statement 3 referred to mysticism. Drollery aside, ISTM that Libertarianism fits better.
Also, from Mr. Gaiman:
My argument was that even government’s non-ideal approach may be better than the sweet spot of a small charity.
At worst, governments are poor stewards of taxpayers’ money. Yet they are still (somewhat distantly) answerable to the people and their nominal goal is to maximize effectiveness and minimize overhead. Private charities, on the other hand, try to maximize the overhead. They want to hire more people, spend more money on advertisement, be able to hire well known musicians for their fundraising event, etc. They are in the business of siphoning as much money as possible for their own needs, while maintaining their public image.
I am sure that you are going to suggest that public donations will favor charities that are efficient and effective, because that is the right thing to do. You would be wrong for two reasons. First, there is a vast gulf between the reality and the public image. It’s called PR and Marketing. Second, people are (mostly) moved by selfish motivations. If I voluntarily decide to give $1000 to charity, I do so because I care for the cause. I may invest several hours of my time into researching which charity is most efficient/effective. However, if the state forces me to give $1000 to charity, why should i bother? I’ll go with the charity that has the brightest add or funniest commercial.
Sometimes. For them. That doesn’t mean the “sweet spot” is anything but destructive for everyone else. The world is full of “perverse incentives” that make a world run on self interest much different than the utopia the libertarians like to claim.
Hijacking the thread:
I think that (true) communism cares about the individual. “We may all be poor, but none of us will be starving.” (Please spare me the reference to Stalin’s USSR - that had nothing to do with true communism)
Capitalism takes the big picture. “We as society will be better off, and few people starving is the cost of doing business.”
Libertarianism is different in that it does not even acknowledge the wider society. “I am doing well and the others may not even exist.”
One thing about the OP that offends me is the violence he’s doing to language.
“Charity” by definition, is voluntary. To speak of a “charitable mandate” is to speak gibberish. Frankly, I don’t have a lot of time of patience to gibberish I encounter in GD.
Welcome to the SDMB, btw, Joshuagenes. Inauspicious as your debut to the site has turned out to be, I hope you enjoy your tenure.
This alone would hugely undermine the efficiency of charitable organizations (hell, it already does.) When they have to spend a lot of money on advertising and promotion, that’s money that doesn’t get used to fight hunger or cure diabetes.
True; it would really have to end up being called something else. Ultimately, it’s a tax, isn’t it, since I’m obliged by law to pay it? If I pay the IRS, or pay directly to an organization doing good works, what’s the difference?
I am sorry I offended your sense of language but I haven’t any good way around it. After all the point of language is to communicate, and the phrase “a charitable mandate” seems to do work inspite of its imperfections.
Thanks for your welcome, I do love debate.
I wish to re-emphasize that efficiency of a charity is only important to me as it relates to how effective a charity on a dollar per dollar basis. I am also concerned with the long term stability of the system as a whole. Is the system diversified? Do we have choke points? Is the system relevant today? Can the system adapt quickly to the changing needs of the populus? Can the system taylor itself to the needs of the individual communities? Does the system help the economy or hurt it.
I am concerned that large one-size fits all solutions are the opposite of everything I value.
If the economy is a river which flows from the hills and down to the lake where it accumulates. Then the charitable mandate is the sun evaporating the lake and the river and causing it to rain down on the hills again. In society some people are better at accumulating wealth than others but if too much wealth is accumuated the economy won’t flow. The flow of the economy creates wealth and it remains in the interest of everyone in society to ensure that flow. The charitable mandate takes wealth from everyone and sends it to poor where it can flow back through the economy from whence it came. A good economy also helps the poor.
Governments are answerable to the people, but it takes a lot of inefficiency and graft to generate a public response. Most voters vote values or pocketbook issues, or if they are reliant on a federal program, vote strictly based on who isn’t going to cut their benefits.
I believe that Ronald Reagan successfully rode dissatisfaction with how government operates into the White House, but he never fixed the problem and it hasn’t been a big issue in elections since. Al Gore made some serious progress with his Reinventing Government initiative, but all that really did politically was signal that the Clinton administration wasn’t a typical Democratic administration, it wasn’t exactly a huge issue.
Actually, most of us here probably agree with your hydrological metaphor.
We just see “taxes” and “government” as being the necessary feedback mechanism to prevent the pooling of too much wealth in too few hands and to prevent extreme human misery among the poor and helpless: the ill, the elderly, the temporarily unemployed, the disabled…
We lived through a Dickensian era of voluntary charities. They simply didn’t do the job. They were not able to.
A system of designated charities would result in huge windfalls for popular charities, and some very, very hard times for obscure ones. A slightly more rational system of distributing assistance involves a more objective way of assessing real need.
And, yes, in a democracy, a measure of popularity will still fall out, as people elect representatives who have a record of funneling money to popular causes. To some degree, you can’t escape it. Still, I’d rather the County Board of Supervisors handle the allocation of money to the ill and indigent than let the internet do it.
(“My disease just went viral!”)
Here’s a good example of government just allowing fraud to happen for political reasons:
On the heels of the Supreme Court’s ruling, interviews and records show, the Obama administration’s political appointees at the Justice and Agriculture Departments engineered a stunning turnabout: they committed $1.33 billion to compensate not just the 91 plaintiffs but thousands of Hispanic and female farmers who had never claimed bias in court.
The deal, several current and former government officials said, was fashioned in White House meetings despite the vehement objections — until now undisclosed — of career lawyers and agency officials who had argued that there was no credible evidence of widespread discrimination. What is more, some protested, the template for the deal — the $50,000 payouts to black farmers — had proved a magnet for fraud.
“I think a lot of people were disappointed,” said J. Michael Kelly, who retired last year as the Agriculture Department’s associate general counsel. “You can’t spend a lot of years trying to defend those cases honestly, then have the tables turned on you and not question the wisdom of settling them in a broad sweep.”
The compensation effort sprang from a desire to redress what the government and a federal judge agreed was a painful legacy of bias against African-Americans by the Agriculture Department. But an examination by The New York Times shows that it became a runaway train, driven by racial politics, pressure from influential members of Congress and law firms that stand to gain more than $130 million in fees. In the past five years, it has grown to encompass a second group of African-Americans as well as Hispanic, female and Native American farmers. In all, more than 90,000 people have filed claims. The total cost could top $4.4 billion.
From the start, the claims process prompted allegations of widespread fraud and criticism that its very design encouraged people to lie: because relatively few records remained to verify accusations, claimants were not required to present documentary evidence that they had been unfairly treated or had even tried to farm. Agriculture Department reviewers found reams of suspicious claims, from nursery-school-age children and pockets of urban dwellers, sometimes in the same handwriting with nearly identical accounts of discrimination.
Another good example is the first time homebuyers’ credit. Prisoners were claiming the credit and getting huge tax refunds.
They don’t make you prove you were a farmer, but I’d bet anything they make you prove your race.
So, I could just ‘give’ to a charitable trust, with the sole beneficiary being me. I like it.
Seriously, with no oversight, how would you even expect this idea to work? Oh, you say there will be oversight? Who is going to pay for that? People are going to give their tithe directly to the oversight administration? I think not.
You could also have your representative insert a rider into a bill no one will read giving you a million dollars.
Okay, they don’t do that, but you could set up a foundation, pay yourself a $250,000/yr salary, and if you know a Congressman well and donate to his campaign, you could get a million dollar earmark.
Legal entities are not people. What you have stated is not really a ‘gift’ and you would get in trouble. Trade is not a ‘gift’ either. Under the current system you can reduce you taxes with donations to charitable organizations. The same fraud applies today. Both congress and the courts would be the error handlers for this legislation. They would address abuses as they crop up. The IRS would be the oversight administration. You can not tithe to the IRS. Under the current system the government retains a conflict of interest in that it both regulates charity and provides it. Private charities are a degree of separation from the government and therefore remove that conflict of interest. Now the government can stick to it’s one true talent… GOVERNING.