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this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2024
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Not the same.
Imagine you had an income of 100K a year (as far as I understand this is considered nice but not rich) You pay tax, rent, food, car (maybe a beater, maybe a nice one, not a luxurious one), anything else that most would consider basic expenses. Now you are left with maybe 30K extra? Sure, that is a lot of money, but you do need to save some for you retirement, health complications, and plenty of unexpected things, not to mention if you have kids.
Let's say that you could save only 15K a year and donate the other 15K to charity, this means that you are donating 15% of your income, or more importantly, 50% of your savings. All of this while living a pretty average life style.
Now take someone who earns just 1M a year, not even a billionaire. Sure they might be living some crazy lifestyle that probably costs them a lot, but that is a choice that is wildly different then the choice of living bare bones compared to an average lifestyle. Meaning, that if they were to live an average lifestyle, maybe a bit extra, let's say that they pay all the same things but with an added 10%, they will now be left wit about 920K a year, even if they donate only 10% of their savings, they would still donate 613% of what you donated. And if they went with saving like you, heck, even 6 times what you save, so 90K a year, they would be able to donate 830K, so 55 times what you can donate.
And this is a millionaire, not a billionaire...
So yes, if you have expendable income I think it is your moral obligation to figure out how much you can donate and do that, but you will never share the same responsibility as a millionaire, let alone a billionaire.
Fuck em.
Sure they have more money to donate, but most of population is not donating even a single cent even if they could. I do have savings which I am keeping to buy a decent flat. In theory I don't necessarily must have it and I could settle with worse option and instead help someone who is worse than me, yet I am chosing to not do it.
We can also help by donating our time instead of money, go volunteer in soup kitchen or something like that. I don't ever see myself doing that.
I donate maybe 15 eur per year through some store options (I either get 1 cent per each 1 eur I spend or I can transfer it to charity. Or with deposit system I can donate 10 cents per each can, bottle of beverage I buy instead of getting that deposit back). I don't think I have explicitly transferred money otherwise. Relatively speaking I am just as bad as any billionaire when it comes to charity.
I would start by saying that we should all keep the idea of donations in our minds everyday in my opinion, and maybe you should consider donating if you say that you can, you know, be the change you want to see.
But I think you are missing the point that even if your final decision is the same as a billionaire, that is to donate 0%-1% of your savings, you are still not in the same category, not amount wise, not savings wise, and not impact wise. You not donating 10% of your savings does actually make a significant difference in you life while making an insignificant difference in comparison to what a billionaire can donate. A billionaire can donate a significant percentage of his savings with an insignificant difference to himself, while making a significant difference for others.
The billionaire is choosing not to make a really really significant good deed with almost zero consequences to himself, you are choosing not to do an admirable deed that has a tolerable but very real difference to you.
So it might seem the same, but in reality these are not even comparable situations.