Well, The Chronicle of Philanthropy just confirmed a majority of Americans? suspicions. According to a new report issued Sunday, wealthy Americans have given less to charity than the poor in the years revolving around the Great Recession.
Residents of these Corporate States of America earning more than $200,000 annually diminished their contributions to charity by 4.6 percent between 2006 and 2012. But what did the rest of us do in that time period, those of us squeaking out a living from increasingly longer hours for less and less pay? Why, folks earning less than $100,000 a year increased their contributions to charity by 4.5 percent, creating an ugly greed gap of 9.1 percent between the haves and have-nots. And let’s face it, even $100,000 sounds like a whole heap of money to a wide swath of Americans today. This country is being made up more and more by people who are lucky to make $20,000 a year.
The Chronicle’s study underlines something I learned years ago canvassing door to door on behalf of the Clean Air Act in Michigan: the wealthier the neighborhood being canvassed, the more doors were slammed in your face, the more likely you were to be threatened and literally chased out of the neighborhood by irate residents; whereas, in the poorest neighborhoods, folks gave whatever they could to help in far greater numbers. Some even attempted to donate food stamps, and no one ever chased you away under a barrage of menacing threats.
But why are those who have less willing to give than those who don’t?
Because the poor understand the necessity of community. It’s a survival skill. The poorer a community is, the more the community has to come together to survive. You give, because you know firsthand what it is to need, to lack, and you also learn how to receive with gratitude, with grace. And this give and take does not, in turn, create shame amongst people, spreading over the community like a plagued rain cloud, but instead cements a bond between residents. It brings the village together in a way that one with money galore sitting in the independence of their own gilded compound will never understand. It’s beautiful.
Lest readers think the stats above are a misconstrued fluke, here is another one for you.
In 2012, charitable contributions amongst the rich rose by $4.6 billion compared to six years earlier, despite the fact that the rich are giving 4.6 percent less.
What does that mean?
It means two things.
One, there are more rich people today. The small cluster of wealthy elites in the Corporate States is growing rapidly, even as a wide, wide majority of Americans sink into poverty and the Middle Class vanishes.
Second, it means that those who were already rich are simply much more rich than they were six years ago. For example, someone donating 20 percent of a $1 billion salary ($200 million) can diminish the percentage of their donations and still end up giving more if they are earning an incredibly larger amount of money. After all, reducing 20 percent by 4.6 percent to 15.4 percent from the larger salary of $2 billion would still yield donations of $308 million. See how that works?
While the poor and Middle Class get squeezed tighter and tighter to the point of abject poverty and homelessness, they give, give, and give more. At the same time, while more Americans are joining the ranks of the rich, the club remains drastically small compared to the rest of the population, and that club gives less and less, even if the final tally suggests they are giving more. It’s an illusion, and one enabled most likely through the pilfering of American tax dollars. After all, it is this same elite club that runs our government and often complains of its repugnance for welfare programs even as it acts as the biggest welfare suckfish in the country, so don’t bow down too far to kiss their feet. Keep in mind they got rich off your money and are progressively giving back less and less of it to you as they scrunch their noses and lecture you about pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. Folks won’t need their charity so much, if at all, if their own earnings weren’t being withheld and stolen from them in the first place.
So, the next time you state the rich are stingier with their money than the poor and someone gives you guff about it, just point them toward the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s recent study and ask them why they’re being such an institutionalized patsy for the robber barons of our era.
This is nothing new, folks. Read your history.
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Dylan Hock is a poet, novelist, professor and social activist. He is published in a number of little magazines and has an essay on the muzzling of Ezra Pound included in the anthology ?Star Power: The Impact of Branded Celebrity?. Follow him on Ello, Google+, LinkedIn, RebelMouse and Goodreads. Hire him for freelance writing and editing work on Elance.
