Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge after 15 years: Only 9 of the 256 billionaires actually followed through on giving away half their wealth

The prospect of still being billionaires, but with less billions, was just too much to handle

Exactly why they need to be taxed more.
- Billionaires shouldn't exist to begin with and don't assume tax money are used by governments for good.
I mean, you don’t become a billionaire by giving money away.
- Uh, yeah you do. What do you think charities are for? Helping people?

Now imagine if there was some way a government could take a percentage of that and put it towards improving society as a whole.

Oh well, guess we're fucked.

BUT THAT WOULD BE COMMUNISM!!1!
- stop stop i'm already hard
Now imagine if there was some way a government could take a percentage of that and put it towards improving society as a whole.
Yes, some form of "giving pledge" where the amount was standardized and there was no option to back out. Radical thinking here.

Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.

I really like that as a term, never come across it before.

tbh I'm surprised that there are 9 who did

as a reward we should leave them for last

On an unrelated note, Bill Gates is in the epstein list.

And the reason Melinda divorced him.
- Serious or joke?
Didn't know that, but not surprised.

Meh. I actually don't think its a good idea. You just draw power away from the best of a segment empowering the biggest assholes. Taxes should be progressive and include all sources of income not just wages and the tax brackets should go all the way up to the highest income level. So there should be a level for over 100 billion and another for over 10 billion and over 1 billion and so on. Five figure income should be zero.

Taxes should be progressive
Yeah ofc. Why do you think the billionaires came up with this BS plan instead?
I agree with you and your proposal with the exception of 5 figure income having no income tax. At a billion level it might not be so important the difference between one or two billion. But on the 5 digits salaries, the difference of someone making 30k or someone making 80k is definitely meaningful. And as someone being in a comfy point in between there I do think everyone in my bracket should be paying taxes. Not high, but definitely something. Then lower incomes then yes, definitely 0% tax. But the amount of people on 5 digits salaries that are on the higher end is definitely worth having some tax, even when a small amount it already helps support the system with so many.
- At the upper end you might be able to swing the more modest of housing and put away for retirement and that is great but it is not like changes circumstances that much. I would argue that opposite that the 2billion is one billion of funny money over what the one bilion guy has and should be taxed along the lines of lottery winnings.
Five figure income should be zero? $10,000/year is not a livable income.
- as papastevesy said im advocating for zero tax on five figures which would go up to 99,999.99
- They're saying the tax rate should be 0 for 5-figure incomes.
- It's not a serious income. Why penalise the ppl at the bottom?

The fact that there are 256 billionaires is an absolute failure of our society.

256 billionaires that we know of!
- Soon to be a few trillionaires and a thousand billionaires

Wowza scoob. Imagine that. Rich people lying.

Just wow.

They broke their arms patting themselves on their backs and can’t write checks anymore. 😢

why did they only use an 8-bit number to count billionaires , surely there are more of em

/dumbface

What are you, one-based or something? If it were an 8-bit integer there would have been 255.
- it's 255 for maximum index, but still 256 for maximum count though lol but agreed, 255 would be more obvious

You don't understand, they're making money so much faster than they can reasonably give away.

making money
I think you mean stealing money.
- Not true.
  They’re also using imaginary methods to make money grow out of other money.
This is kind of the actual problem though. It's hard to actually have effective charities. Even some of the most ethical, and well run charities, end up with surplus funds (Dolly Parton's charity for example). The government is setup to spend that much money helping people though. But paying taxes is somehow bad and wrong. I don't know if I had a real point other than maybe we should actually tax these rich folks so they can achieve their dream of giving away at least half their wealth.
- There was a post a while ago where a German person posted that they were confused by the US nonprofit systems, they basically said I pay my taxes and the government makes sure it's spent feeding the needy and foreign aid and all that. Why should I go through the trouble of researching all these charities trying to find a good one to donate to.
  Not that Germany doesn't have non profits, but they really should be for special interest type cases where you explicitly want to send money to a cause, not general global well being.
- Please do not compare Dolly Parton to Bill Gates.
Then they're not really trying. I get what @Hobo@Lemmy.World is saying, but I find it hard to believe. If their bar for "respectable charities" leads to them not being able to find charities, then just lower the bar. Or just give money to people.
- Yep, pay for everyone's university for a year, pay everyone's healthcare debt, do something.

Who would have thought

I forget where I heard this story, but apparently Bill and Melinda were at a dinner party during the Obama Presidency. Bill said that he had "way more power than Obama" and Melinda kicked him under the table. TBF I think he was completely right: politicians in the US derive their power from their ability to raise money from rich donors, while rich donors derive their power directly from their money. And they continue to derive power from their money even when they deposit it into a "foundation" which doles it out tax-free to favored recipients.

In Gates' case, a lot of his "charity" involves donating patent-protected drugs to third world countries to forestall their saying "fuck your patents" and producing life-saving drugs for themselves. Preserving intellectual property rights is the primary goal here, with actually helping people secondary. Anyone who thinks these ruthless multi-billionaires suddenly become benign, caring people in their advanced years is a rube.

politicians in the US derive their power from their ability to raise money from rich donors, while rich donors derive their power directly from their money
Technically they derive their power from the electoral mandate, but to achieve it requires a lot of money from said rich donors - so they don't derive their power from it, it's more a prerequisite to play at all. The second half is true. The rich are just rich, nobody voted them into wealth, that's why they're more powerful than the politicians.

by followed up you mean: "Ok after I die, I will donate half of my money to my tax-exempt family-owned-and-operated charity, that just happened to only pay salaries and donations to causes that serve the interests of our family-owned-and-operated shell companies"... :D

it's like sequeezing your late's father dry-drenched cumsocket which he used his entire life, then drinking it, and brag about it... to which I say thanks but no fucking thanks.

Link to report instead of awful Fortune link: Giving Pledge

giving half their wealth to what? charities that they control for pushing agendas (and possibly money laundering if we are talking about billionaires in third world countries with much less regulations)

Relocation is a bogus threat. Billionaires will not leave first world countries.
- They will, on paper.

Is any of that because what would have been half their worth 15 years ago is now less than half of what it would be?

Like, if someone had 100 billion in 2010, and did give away 50 billion in that time, but also made a further 20 billion in that time, did they give away half their worth or not?

I've not read the article, so maybe that question is answered in there.

These people are genuinely sick in the head, this level of pointless greed is not normal. Of course they aren't going through with it.

Can't say that I'm shocked.

Lmao fuck them my taxesare higher then half

Once you start to have money, you get a money dependency. No matter how rich you get, the "baseline you really need to live the life you want and nothing more" growths together with your wealth.

Take lottery winners and ask them if they could give away half of their gains. Will you be surprised if most of them say no, even though the day before they would have set their "minimum needed to live a happy life for the rest of my days" at a much smaller fraction of it?

Now take a similar population, but who in addition rationalized them deserving that money through their hard work and talent.

Pledge

Words are meaningless.

This article has slightly more dirt but still seems a bit vague on hard numbers and names.

Or their wealth has grown so rapidly that they gave away half of their 2010 wealth?

That’s 247 billionaires we could have put in the buffet. Never trust a billionaire. Eat them at first opportunity.

Wow the greediest scumbags on the planet lied about giving up their ill gotten power? I'm shocked! SHOCKED! \s

Even if they gave half of their fortune they will still be rich, but no we need 9 yachts and private islands.

As though a wealthy person would speak the Truth...

Take it from them all

Take it all from them*
As soon as you give up everything you own.

Jesse Welles - Philantropist

To be fair, I would have a hard time giving billions away. I don't have any, and I probably will never (except if an event of hyper inflation happens), but that's just a technicality.

Anyone surprised?

Not really but having the report is handy to counter those "at least they're donating half their money, what have you ever done so impactful?" mindless drones on reddit and hackernews.