40 billionaires to give half their wealth to charity

[Rob Williams]

Have you ever said, "If I were a billionaire, I'd give a lot of money to charity"? Well, it seems like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have joined forces to help persuade the world's billionaires to do just that, and as it stands, there are FORTY of them willing to donate up to half of their wealth to charity. Wow.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38556042/ns/us_news-giving/

This could only be a good thing, because even though half of what these billionaires have is still a far stretch from what's really needed to get this earth back in order, and to give EVERYONE food, and EVERYONE medicine, it sure would be a major gain. Plus, if billionaires are willing to donate that much money, maybe the regular Joe will be more open to doing what he can to help charity. Sounds good to me.

 

[eunoia]

Inception worked!

 

[Doomsday]

i hope this makes a difference!

 

[killem2]

Amazing.

 

[madstork91]

... 99% of 100,000,000,000 still means they are leaving their kids with 1,000,000,000.

I wish they would give it to resolve the nations debt.

I have actually been teaching this in class recently as a topic for discussion. (Im reaching ESL in South Korea)

 

[Kougar]

I wish they would give it to resolve the nations debt.

Are you kidding? The politicians would act like a 16 year old that had been given an American Express Gold card and told to enjoy the weekend at Mall of America. Not to mention all states, municipalities, and county governments would each want their own budget bailouts. Especially given that their own carefully pre-planned budgets aren't going to recover from the lost revenue they got from housing market taxes for quite a long time.

There'd have to be some serious stipulations and other rules set in place so we wouldn't end up with the same debt all over again in 50 years from now. Keep in mind that since the 60's, with the exception of one odd year with Nixon and part of President Clinton's term, the US government has always been increasing the size of the deficit. If it suddenly vanished they'd be spending the money otherwise sent to maintain interest payments to other places or projects they wanted to push.

 

[Tharic-Nar]

Not to mention, the debt is in the trillions, over $1.3 trillion I believe, all those billionaires donating spare cash would actually make next to no difference, and quite a few aren't even American, so why should they donate to the US, lol? I still find the whole 'donate to charity' thing misleading.... Which charities? Some are good, some are bad, some are just tax havens owned by the very same billionaires (indirectly of course).

Sorry, I should take off my tinfoil hat now...