income and charitable giving
via sarah w., philanthropy news digest, and mcclatchy:
according to 2007 data from the bureau of labor statistics, the poorest one-fifth of American households contributed an average of 4.3 percent of their income to charitable organizations, relative to about 2.1 percent of income for the richest fifth. i only have the aggregated quintile data, so i can't do much more than the graphic below.
the negative association (r = -.66) between income and giving suggests that the rich do less than they could or should. that said, there's a strong positive correlation between income and absolute (if not relative) giving. based on the data above, the poorest fifth gave $453 on average in 2007, relative to $3,337 from the top quintile. if the rich had been giving at the rate of the poor, they would more than double their charitable contributions -- from $3,337 to about $6,832 per year.
posted by christopher uggen @ 10:53 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
"Pretax income" appears only as an expense on the balance sheets of those you sell to, not as your own income, and so is meaningless when measuring what people do with the wealth they have.
I'd be willing to bet that the trend would be reversed if you only included the income a person has personal control over, post-tax income.
I agree that there would be a difference if taxes were factored in, but you'd have to factor in sales tax and property tax as well. Those taxes hit the lowest quintile much harder as a percentage of income. I'd love to see the data.
People want more and more like this good post........
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