Aspire with Osha: art, nature, humanity
Osha interviews people who are dedicated to working to create a better future for us all in the fields of art, nature and humanity. We explore stories and discover people on a quest to deepen our connection to life and to our common humanity. On Aspire with Osha you’ll meet people who are passionate about creating a more positive future. There will be music, poetry and inspiring stories. Come hang out with us and if you like what you hear, like us and help spread the word. Thank you!
Aspire with Osha: art, nature, humanity
What's Up With The Giving Pledge? with guest Bella DeVaan
With wealth inequality growing by the minute, and the dismantling or hollowing out of public programs, there is now, perhaps more than ever, a need for charitable giving.
In today’s interview, we’ll reveal the results of an important report on the status of the Giving Pledge - 15 years after its creation. You may be wondering, what is the Giving Pledge? Founders Bill Gates, ex-wife Melinda French and Warren Buffet established the Pledge to encourage greater charitable giving by billionaires to fulfill their commitment to the public good. Stay tuned to hear what this report reveals about philanthropic giving.
The funding bill passed in 2025 by Congress transfers even more wealth from working people to billionaires and large corporations by lowering their tax rates. Are they using that wealth to give back to the common good through charitable giving? How have things changed in the past 15 years?
Bio
Our guest is Bella DeVaan, Associate Director of the Charity Reform Initiative and a Co-editor of Inequality.org. DeVaan graduated cum laude with a B.A. in American Studies from Columbia University, where she studied inequality and philanthropy.
This podcast covers a lot of information, so I'm including relevant links.
Report on the Giving Pledge, 15 years later: https://ips-dc.org/report-giving-pledge-at-15/
https://inequality.org/subscribe
Book: Burned by Billionaires - by Chuck Collins
If you enjoyed this show, please leave a positive review and share with your friends. Thank you! Osha
With wealth inequality growing by the minute and the dismantling or hollowing out of public programs, there is now, perhaps more than ever, a need for charitable giving. In today's interview, we'll reveal the results of an important report on the status of the giving pledge 15 years after its creation. And you may be wondering what is the giving pledge? Well, founders Bill Gates, ex-wife Melinda French, and Warren Buffett established the pledge to encourage greater charitable giving by billionaires to fulfill their commitment to the public good. Stay tuned to hear what this report reveals about philanthropic giving. This is Aspire with Osha, Art, Nature, Humanity, and I'm your host, Osha Hayden. Our guest is Bella Devon, Associate Director of the Charity Reform Initiative and co-editor of inequality.org. Devon graduated Cam Laude with a BA in American Studies from Columbia University, where she studied inequality and philanthropy. Welcome to the show, Bella Devon.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for having me, Osha. Really happy to be here.
Speaker:So, Bella, you are one of the authors of The Giving Pledge at 15, the report that tracks the progress of billionaires who signed the pledge in 2010 to distribute the majority of their wealth, over 50%, to charities in their lifetimes. Can you tell us about the intentions behind the pledge and why it's so important?
Speaker 1:Yeah, of course. The Giving Pledge was established in 2010 by the three billionaires you mentioned, Bill Gates, his wife Melinda French at the time, and Warren Buffett, to really encourage and inspire charitable giving and to encourage people with a lot of wealth to really conceive of a responsibility that they have to society that has helped make them so wealthy. Gates grew up in a really philanthropic family that sort of set a model for him of how one ought to, you know, conceive of the common good, think of themselves as a part of a society that requires a lot of generosity and is also built up by it and uplifted by it. And I think that these three people really saw how their industries and their businesses and their wealth were accumulating so quickly to the point that they'd really need to give back in a way that was publicly accountable, in a way that was visible to the public. And it definitely had something to do with mounting income inequality in America. This country has always had a bargain and expectation that our wealthiest people are civically minded and give back. And so the pledge was really meant to be a community of wealthy people who were sharing ideas, philosophies of giving, publicizing their major gifts, getting together at least annually and talking about what they're doing, trends they're noticing, metrics they're using to evaluate their giving. And that was really the intent. It was to popularize the practice among the billionaire cohort and to also send a signal to people who aren't within it that listen, we're gonna do our part.
Speaker:Let's talk about the rapid growth of billionaire fortunes. It's just been accelerating at an exponential sort of rate. Can you give us a little bit of context?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think it's the story of our country, this rapidly accelerating inequality that has created fortunes that are of a magnitude that I don't think we can really even grasp. There's some amazing graphics I've seen of the number of thousands of years it would take for a regular Amazon employee to accumulate the amount of wealth that Jeff Bezos has in his accounts. And this is a phenomenon of so many different things. It's a phenomenon of our tax code, which doesn't properly reward work and rewards wealth in and of itself and allows it to keep accumulating. And, we're left with an economy in which a few families, a handful of people, have more wealth than the rest of the bottom half combined. And this is a product of our political will, of our political choices. It's not something that's inevitable, but it's a system that's really evolved to an absurd extent to leave a lot of people in the lurch and make some people so wealthy that they don't even know what to do with all of the wealth that they have.
Speaker:And I know that Elon Musk is, I believe, still the wealthiest person or billionaire on the planet. Do you want to just tell us about how much wealth he he owns?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I can try. I mean, I think that Elon Musk is on track to be our world's first trillionaire. I know that he has several hundreds of billions of dollars. And of course, that figure fluctuates dramatically, but there's an upward trend line there, as there is for all of our tech science. Musk is wealthier than many nations. He has the power of a nation-state and how he operates, and as we can see, his influence is manifested in the current presidential administration. And as we can get into, as this report shows, his philanthropic giving really exemplifies his attitude about what he owes society. It's not something that's in keeping with the sense of obligation that Bill Gates and Warren Buffett were attempting to establish. There's a lot of self-dealing, there's a lot of using philanthropy to maximize tax benefits, there's a lot of abdication of responsibility to a society that made you that wealthy. I think that's really the story of Elon Musk. It's very concerning and sinister.
Speaker:So, what percentage of billionaires signed on to the pledge, and what percentage have actually fulfilled the pledge, have achieved that fulfillment?
Speaker 1:It's a great question. When the pledge was established in 2010, there were 57 signatories, and we include couples as single signatories in this case because often they operate as a unit. So there are 57 signatories, and at the time in 2010, that was about 14% of American billionaires. There are some international signatories, but we don't study them in the same depth because we feel like this report really needs to focus on the American political economy to be coherent and tell the right story. Today there are 256 signatories. That's about 13% of our billionaire population. So the proportion of total billionaires has remained somewhat stable, indicating the number of them that want to think of themselves as a part of this mandate and this collective. It's not the vast majority by any means. And of the 256, we have accounted for nine that have fulfilled the pledge already. One couple that's alive, John and Laura Arnold, and they've fulfilled the pledge mainly by making grants to their personal uh private foundation. And there are 22 pledgers who have passed. And the pledge isn't just to give away half your fortune within your lifetime, it's also upon your death. So you could theoretically fulfill the pledge by on the day of your death, your will or your estate planning makes good on that promise. That's allowed within the uh originally established owners. 22 pledgers have passed away who signed on in 2010, and only eight of them have technically fulfilled the pledge. One person in particular who we really uplift as an example of someone who's actually made good on the pledge is a man named Chuck Feeney. He founded the duty-free shoppers and had a uh a lot of investments, and he gave away the vast majority of his wealth in his lifetime, and he actually ended his life, though a billionaire at one point, uh, living in a modest apartment in San Francisco. And so we really uplift Feeney as the kind of exception that proves the rule that the giving pledge is unfulfillable in its current form and with its current energy and public awareness. There's also the example of Mackenzie Scott, who's doing a great job giving money away quickly and in a trust-based capacity. But nine out of 256, that's not looking good.
Speaker:It's not a very high percentage. And when you consider that you started out with only 13% of billionaires to begin with, the percentage of people, of billionaires who have vast amounts of wealth, are not really fulfilling their pledges. I mean, I want to talk also about dynastic wealth, because I think that's really where we're headed here. We think that there's just a small handful of people now, but it's going to be even smaller because they're just these people who are passing on their wealth over and over again, often without a lot of tax consequences, correct?
Speaker 1:That's a very astute thing to notice, and something we really want people to take away from our report. So the consequences of this, the strategies of fulfillment that are being used and the absence of fulfillment that's happening, means that more and more wealth is going to be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. It's going to be winnowed into families in the form of trillion-dollar dynastic private foundations that don't pay taxes, don't pay their money out to working charities on the ground quickly in any way. And giving to philanthropy is a very well-established, estate planning mechanism to help shield some money from the tax man, you know, in somebody's um turning over. And it's really difficult to think of that, that money that's earmarked for charity and intended for generosity as far as the public is concerned, doesn't actually end up reaching that place. We don't think that that's quite right.
Speaker:It doesn't seem right.
Speaker 1:Yes. To put it simply.
Speaker:Who is paying for the fact that they're not paying their share of taxes? Who ends up paying for it? That is the question. Who benefits from this system? There's an indignity to it because, on the one hand, you know, two things can be true at once when this much money is concentrated in these hands. That these billionaires, when they do give gifts, give transformative amounts, have been responsible by giving their money for life-changing medical interventions and inventions, and, you know, have stepped in in times of crisis for sure. But the other story that's true is they've stagnated a lot of wealth and not given enough away and have overinfluenced the way that money shapes our civil society, our healthcare infrastructure, our universities, you name it. So these things can be true all at once because of how big the money is. And we really think that we need to shift the way we think about generosity and charitable giving for people to understand that they're subsidizing it. It's not just something that people are doing out of the goodness of their heart. It's lost tax revenue. And we uh use a study that has estimated that for every dollar that a billionaire gives to charity, the public chips in 74 cents of lost tax revenue in terms of how that gift is getting subsidized, whether for capital gains tax or gift tax avoidance. And so, or, you know, sidestepping, if you want to call it that. So we think if you look at philanthropy that way, it makes the stagnation of funds and intermediaries and in the accounts of very few people even more egregious. I think that it's important to talk too about, you know, what the world looks like with an increase in dynastic wealth. I mean, you have children who inherit these vast fortunes, who are whisked around in limousines and private jets, who have really no connection whatsoever with ordinary American life. They probably never walked into a grocery store in their lives. Then they have an outsized influence and control over the shape of our, I can't say democracy anymore. Oops.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker:Our government. Over the shape of our government. Right. And we know that there was a huge influence in our elections by billionaires, some pretty overt, like Musk giving away, you know, I'll give you a million dollars, to vote for Trump. Sort of some wild things there. Yeah. I think we want to really try to conceptualize what the world looks like when you have people who are pretty much in control of the government, of the economy, of the rules that get passed, the laws that get passed, because they end up writing the laws, right?
Speaker 1:There's a lot of gray area between philanthropic strategies and priorities and how those values manifest in our government. It's true. Of course, the sector is meant to be set apart from politics and not engage in politics as directly as you would hope. And um, those are the 501c3 organizations. But of course, there's a slippery slope there. And of course, there's there's outsized influence of billionaires in our democracy through their philanthropic channels and through their just hard political giving. Um, I think the point that you've made about the insularity of wealth is so important here because it is true that when people don't have lived experience that connects them to the common good, if they don't have to take a train with everyone else, if they don't have to experience why we need a robustly funded public sector and public sphere, they won't understand why that's something that needs to be protected, upheld, expanded. And um that insularity becomes really dangerous. I think that um there's a kind of old adage in the study of philanthropy that people give money away how they make it. And when people who have gotten really wealthy in our current economy have made money off of more abstract forms of work, off of technology, when they want to see really technical outcomes of how their funding has made the most impact. That also does something to the meaning of generosity if you're trying to quantify an impact that you have on people or evaluate success through different narrow, more technical parameters. We lose some humanity and we lose some protection of people on the basis of our shared humanity. And I don't think that that should stand either. So there's this combination of the insularity of wealth and also its abstraction from our shared humanity.
Speaker:To me, $300 billion is a pretty abstract concept because it's hard to even visualize that much money.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's true. I mean, it's it's not the amount of money that any one individual should have.
Speaker:Well, let's take a short break and come back in just a few minutes and we'll talk more about the giving pledge at year 15 and what you've learned from this wonderful in-depth research that you have all done in order to gather all of this information. So we'll be right back. Stay tuned.
Speaker:I just want to say thank you for listening. If you enjoyed the show, please tell your friends, find us on social media, and leave us a positive review. You can find my show, Aspire with Osha, on my website, OshaHayden.com, or on your favorite podcast app. We'll be back in just a moment. Welcome back to Aspire with Osha. In case you're just joining us, this is Aspire with Osha, and I'm your host, Osha Hayden. I am here with Bella DeVaan, who is one of the authors of the Giving Pledge at 15. She works at inequality.org as one of the co-editors at inequality.org at the Institute for Policy Studies. So glad to have you here, Bella. We've been learning a lot in our first segment about wealth inequality and what we're seeing as a result of this uh tracking of the pledge and the research that you guys have done. How long did it take you to pull all that research together?
Speaker 1:It took us, you know, a good part of this year, several months. We have a wonderful research director named Helen Flannery. Shout out to Helen who um did an amazing job analyzing 990 forms, which are the tax filings of a lot of nonprofit organizations. And we also worked with a lot of public databases to put this information together. It's hard to tell a clear story of the pledge, and we're just working off of information that's been made public. So there was a lot of discernment required, a lot of um, you know, distillation of the key stories, but it definitely took us a while. And um, just really excited to get this out into the public to start conversation.
Speaker:I think it's really important the work that you guys are doing in tracking this and bringing attention to what is really going on sort of behind the scenes with the wealth and equality and why, why that wealth equality is inequality is becoming more and more vast. I mean, the gap between the billionaires and everyone else is just becoming so large now that it's hard to even imagine how we get back to democracy at some point.
Speaker 1:I think that that's right. It's infuriating and it's almost unfathomable. And yet we're living through its consequences or starting to.
Speaker:Well, especially when you have this big bill that basically transfers even more wealth from regular people, working Americans, to the richest and wealthiest among us who get the greatest benefit at the same time that they're hollowing out all of the services that people rely on. In the report, it mentions that the total giving, charitable giving, by working people compared to the billionaires, is close to the same amount.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so the calculation that we came to was that if the living pledgers who are still billionaires who signed on in 2010, so that's not even all of the pledgers, that's 256, um, that figure would be even greater. But if just the ones who signed on 15 years ago who are still billionaires gave their money away and fulfilled their pledges today, that would be almost $370 billion. And for context, as you're mentioning, Osha, the calculation by Giving USA is that all individuals in the US were responsible for $392 billion of giving last year. For those numbers to be in the same ballpark, let alone one being just 20 billion more than the other, is pretty obscene. You know, that's that's 57, or there were 57 signatories, now there are 32 who are still billionaires versus hundreds of millions of people who give, that's not a fair comparison. That's not something that a democracy can withstand that level of influence, even if it's in the name of generosity and is as aligned with the public benefit as we'd love to imagine, although we know from the examples and anecdotal evidence that that's not the case either.
Speaker:It seems to me that with all of the costs now that are coming back to the American people with the decimating of a lot of health care, of uh public services, people will be having to make up that gap with the tariffs that are basically a tax on ordinary Americans and putting a lot of manufacturers out of business as well. That creates a huge burden on regular people, and then they're the ones who are doing so much of the charitable giving. How is that going to affect the charitable giving in the future as people become less and less wealthy because more and more services are being taken away from them?
Speaker 1:That's such a good question. And I think we can't forget about regular people in having this conversation. Of course, you know, we need to shine a spotlight on how the ultra-wealthy give because of their influence. We also need to, you know, give flowers to regular people who are as generous as they can be always. And yet, when the economy is stagnating wages, increasing the cost of living in the affordability crisis, people can't give more money away. And they can then they can't shape the sector to make sure that our nonprofit services reflect the will of the people. And, you know, these ultra-wealthy givers crowd out regular people from you know the philanthropic sphere. It's also, I love the way that you're talking about the new bill and its consequences, and because absolutely in aggregate, it amounts to this even more obscene wealth transfer to the ultra wealthy and is shortchanging regular people by slashing their access to food benefits and healthcare, which is a tragedy of epic proportions. We're gonna need to rely on philanthropy, unfortunately, to make up for that gap and to make up for that absence of a public guarantee. And based on the way that billionaires are enacting the pledge, there's not a ton of hope that those philanthropic interventions are gonna be as robustly funded as they need to be. I think that the bill also has interesting lessons about how our government ought to shape philanthropy and how this status quo should not be taken as permanent or inevitable. The bill has tinkered with the benefits people get from giving. They've changed the floor for wealthy givers on deducting charitable gifts. It also created a non-itemizer deduction so that regular people can deduct some of their giving from their tax bill, even if they're using the standard deduction, which most people do. I don't I'm not sure about the exact number, but a lot of people do. We estimate that around 10% of people, as of our last calculation, actually itemize their tax bills. So that new deduction exists, but what good will it do when you know you have thousands of dollars more in expenses and in healthcare costs, and you have, you know, fewer dollars in your Pocket because of your wages not keeping pace with all of that. And so the story overall is that the bill is really harming people. But it also proves, if we're looking for a silver lining, that our relationship to philanthropy as it is subsidized by the tax code is very dynamic. And we can go back and make sure that our laws actually register what generosity should be, actually properly treat ultra-wealthy people's gifts, because our laws were established in their contemporary form, most clearly established in 1969 when inequality was at a relative low compared to it is now. And it just proves that we can go back, we can pick up this really interesting legislative history where Congresspeople, senators, regular people were debating how long foundations should exist for, if they should be allowed to grow in perpetuity, or if their grants every year had to keep pace with their asset growth. All these questions are still alive and they're balls in the air. And so we need to just pick them back up if and when we're able to undo some of the damage that this bill is doing.
Speaker:In the report, it talks a lot about the ways in which philanthropists give and some of the advantages for them in terms of having, you know, a medical wing with their name on it, or having a big entertainment venue with their name on it, or having basically their names on buildings.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that there's an issue in philanthropy where gifts or the possibility of gifts or the time spent pursuing them can warp organizations' objectives, missions, ability to deliver on their promise or their ideal outcomes. And that's something that's very unfair and can thrive in a space where giving is voluntary and you need to keep donors happy or understanding and trusting of your mission in order to stay afloat. That's not the same relationship that we have to publicly administered goods.
Speaker:So there are a lot of strategies that billionaires use and mega corporations use to sort of shield their philanthropic giving. Do you want to talk a little bit about some of those strategies that are being employed?
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. So when a regular person gives to charity, typically they give directly. They give a gift to a direct services group, maybe to a food bank, a local housing group. That money is used immediately by the organization. Wealthy people tend to favor intermediating their giving. That looks like giving money to a private foundation that's often named after them or controlled by them using a donor-advised fund, which is kind of like a charitable checking or brokerage account that is sponsored by another organization and make the gifts from there. So when you make those gifts to an intermediary, you get a tax break up front as if you're giving that gift directly to the to the goods and services. But it actually doesn't work that way oftentimes. Those foundations have a mandatory annual payout of 5% every year, and donor advice funds have no requirement. So we see a lot of stagnation of money, or at least a lag time in how that money ends up reaching the kind of things that regular people just give to directly. And of course, there's examples of billionaires giving directly to certain things, but this is the pattern. And by our count, 80% of the gifts made by pledgers to charity to fulfill the pledge have been to private foundations. So they've been to these intermediary groups that have a median payout rate of 9.2%. And that's, you know, better than the minimum. But these groups, these foundations are growing too at the same time. So that's one strategy using a private foundation, using an intermediary. There's also a sort of fashionable use of limited liability corporations, LLCs, and financializing the administration of philanthropy, treating it kind of like a business. So you can make gifts, you can move money in a more fluid way, you can impact invest, you can conceive of your philanthropy as a venture in a way that's a little bit different from the typical configuration. That doesn't have the same overt tax benefits, but it has other tax benefits and it also ensures a lot of privacy. So LLCs and donor-advised funds can help donors take their names off of certain gifts or obscure the sort of uh chain of travel or the story, the ledger of how money moves through different vehicles to fund certain projects. So a good example of donor-advised funds aiding in this is Leonard Leo, who runs something called the 85 Fund and is sort of the architect of the right-wing court-influencing uh network, the Federalist Society, and has been really key to placing different federal judges and Supreme Court justices. Leo really relies on channeling gifts through donor-advised funds and rinsing names off of donations that way to uphold organizations that are really probably only supported by a few people and aren't actually publicly chartered and don't pass the sort of public support test that the IRS uses to help organizations merit their tax benefits. And instead, you can sort of feign that public support by doing strategies like this. So, you know, not every billionaire or wealthy person or person seeking to influence our democracy does the same thing. You know, some billionaires are very transparent and public about the gifts that they make. There's not a one-size-fits-all story, but there is clear evidence that they all favor this intermediation process of putting gifts into private foundations first. And that is what really causes this lag time in how charity actually reaches the public. I hope that answers your question. I know I'm getting into the weeds here.
Speaker:But to kind of put it in context, what what happens is they're they're getting a tax break on the money that they put into their private foundations. Yes. And that tax break is more than 9% for sure.
Speaker 1:The tax break is is pretty big. You know, we've we've seen the sort of egregiously low income tax rates that our wealthiest people pay.
Speaker:And so they're putting all of this money, sometimes billions and billions of dollars, into these private foundations, paying out not very much of it, but using the money in the foundation to make even more money in the foundation. So it's basically some of these, in some cases, not all, it becomes a tax shelter, so that a way to avoid paying your taxes.
Speaker 1:We have to see them that way unless we have proof of otherwise, you know. That's absolutely right. Um, these are organizations that exist in perpetuity, that self-fund. Oftentimes family members can get compensation through these foundations, oftentimes they inherit control of the foundations. You know, they're not always governed or chartered in a way that's democratic. And I don't think that a lot of people understand that, that that is the main destination of a lot of these splashy pledges that also they don't just confer tax breaks up front, they confer these reputational benefits, you know, these bat signals that are like, no, don't worry, you guys, we got it. You know, we know we're really rich, like we're gonna do we're gonna do good things. But where's the proof of that?
Speaker:Love it, bat signals.
Speaker 1:I don't know where that came from, evocative.
Speaker:I love it. They give money really differently than the rest of us. And they get status, they get influence in the way that they do donate their money. So I guess what is the future if we stay on the track that we're on right now with the wealth inequality just increasing, I mean, truly by the minute.
Speaker 1:No, it's it's a good question. I mean, I think I've warned ominously of these huge dynastic foundations, but I think we need to take a second to really visualize like what that might be like. Already we have these massive, you know, multi-program foundations that exert tremendous influence in the production and proliferation of ideas, of the kind of strategies of how we think of health interventions and how how we use common sense to think about how to tackle our world's problems, those foundations are going to be even bigger. They're gonna be bigger by magnitudes we can't understand, as I've been saying. And they're gonna be controlled by family members who might not have even made the wealth that has been given away. And, you know, we can also argue about if anybody, no matter how much money they made off of their success and their brilliance, deserved to control this much money. But certainly the offspring are a different story. And it's interesting because there are some really interesting trends that suggest that young people are staying or preserving more liberal thinking and values as they get older and as they sort of inherit money from a generation that's been more conservative, comparantly, in how they think about their public obligation and how they want to see our government configured. You know, there's gonna be some interesting things happening. It's not just gonna be evil increasing or something like that, but it is going to be anti-democratic, inherently plutocratic, this idea that young people are gonna inherit so much money and have so much control over giving that doesn't just, you know, make sure that people have clothes and emergency access to surgery and food, but also the kind of ideas that reach our newspapers and our airwaves, the kind of art that gets produced and shown to the public, the number of museums and libraries that are open, the ability for people who have no opportunity to access education to access it, and what kind of classes they can take and what kind of graduate degrees they can pursue. You know, the story of so many lives are going to be shaped by this.
Speaker:And the story of who has the opportunities and who doesn't.
Speaker 1:Yes. Always that's the question that we need to ask about the administration of philanthropy.
Speaker:What can people do to shift the policy? What can my listeners do who are listening right now, going, oh, yo, yo, yoi.
Speaker 1:Right. Of course. I know. Wouldn't it be horrible if I just said here's this horrific status quo and there's nothing that we can really do about it. No, this information is meant to mobilize all of us, to galvanize us and empower us with access to this information and understand what we can do differently. Um, there's a few things. We think that the giving pledge could use a little bit of a boost. It could use some new energy. We think that people listening to this could encourage wealthy people, writing to them, you know, through the media, through conversations they just have with their friends, create this sort of groundswell of energy to influence the people who have signed on, to step it up, and to take after Chuck Feeney. That's more of a voluntary influence campaign. We also think that speaking to your elected officials about outrage, about concentrated wealth, about um outrage, about this sort of uh lopsided philanthropic system, to talk about how we really need structural reform on the books, how we need to encourage foundations to give their money away faster, how we need transparency requirements, how we need to re-conceive of how the tax code subsidizes billionaire philanthropy. These are all things that your listeners could maybe take to their elected representatives as I know their list gets longer and longer of things they want to see their representatives advocating for on Capitol Hill or in their cities. And then, yeah, at the really at the heart of this is that none of this would be a story if wealth and income were taxed more fairly. And we think that should be the main policy ask of regular people. And also for people to keep up their giving, to think of themselves as conscientious shareholders in whatever they give to, to think about how their giving can support organizations that build bases, that build power for working people. You know, our program isn't in the business of telling people how to give or what the most strategic philanthropic decisions are, but certainly they don't look like the ones that the ultra-wealthy deploy. And so for people to think about things like that, also if they have a donor-advised fund or an account at a community foundation, you know, to really be an active participant in thinking about how that money is managed, if their fund, you know, does any political lobbying around what, what kind of benefits are they trying to preserve. These are all ways that people can think of their role, their their participatory role in the philanthropic sector. I know that's a long list, but I'm not just gonna tell people go out and volunteer, you know, give whatever you can to the Red Cross. That's all amazing. I have a feeling your listeners are already doing that. This is about redress for the people who get all these benefits and all of this public subsidy for giving that isn't keeping pace with what we need.
Speaker:So there is a lot that we can do to make our voices heard. And I think we're hearing it more. We're hearing people beginning to really speak up about the billionaires and why it is that they are in charge of everything and that they are taking from the rest of us and that they are in control of our government.
Speaker 1:And this is a nonpartisan issue. I want to make clear I as a representative of a 501c3, I'm not talking about supporting anyone in particular, but these issues are resonant across the political spectrum. The concern about concentrated wealth should be shared no matter what your political affiliation is. And that's the angle from which we can approach this as an issue.
Speaker:Oh, and I think that it does totally relate to people of any political party. There are a lot of people who are are having trouble making their payments, people who are unable to buy a home now, people who are unable to afford education. I think the another thing we could do too is to think about anyone who does have investments, think about what kind of investments they have. What are you supporting through those investments?
Speaker 1:Yes, provocative but very important. Mackenzie Scott in her most recent um letter of update on her giving through her yield giving outfit talked about expanding her foray into impact investing and making sure that the money she's investing in growing is investing in the kind of businesses that reflect the values of the philanthropy. Because of course, you know, sometimes philanthropy, billionaire philanthropy takes on this arsonists pretending to be firefighters quality, as Anand Girhardas has called it. And when the investments align with the impact after, you know, the money is taken out of the economy in the marketplace, those things should have more alignment than they obviously do.
Speaker:Yeah. I encourage my listeners to read the report because you'll get a lot more detailed information by reading it. We're giving sort of an overview here. And I'm going to put that in the notes. So there will be the link to the Giving Pledge report. Do you have any books coming out?
Speaker 1:Oh, thank you so much for this opportunity to plug. I really appreciate it. Um, my colleague Chuck Collins, who I know you spoke to recently and had a great conversation with, Chuck has a book coming out about this phenomenon of billionaire wealth, also focused on the climate catastrophe that is induced by concentrated wealth, called Burned by Billionaires. That's coming out in the fall. If you check out our website, inequality.org, you can subscribe to our newsletter, inequality.org/slash subscribe. You can find a weekly digest of what's going on in the world of inequality, and also get a periodic newsletter from our team called the Charity Reformer, which is really focused on the intersection of philanthropy and inequality. So definitely encourage everybody to check that out as well.
Speaker:Well, thank you so much for taking the time today to talk to us and talk to my listeners and give us the scoop on the giving pledge philanthropy. I think it's really eye-opening.
Speaker 1:Thank you for the time and for having me. Really appreciate it. Yeah, so excited to engage with all of your listeners and be a part of the community that you've created through this podcast. It's so wonderful.
Speaker:It's Bella DeVaan, everyone. It's been a great pleasure speaking with you today. Be sure to look for all the notes and references and links for more information. Thank you so much, everyone, for listening today. I really appreciate it. If you enjoyed the show, hit like, leave me a positive review, recommend it to your friends. It really makes a difference. Have an inspired week and live your joy. And remember, when we act from a place of joy and love, we are powerful. And when we join with community, we're even more powerful. So here's to joy. I'll see you next time.