The person whose tags are screenshotted obviously doesnât actually know what a charity is. They say âi want to make sure my money actually goes to the people in need rather than some big org avoiding tax.â
My dude. My person. Sweetie. Charities donât pay tax. If itâs paying taxes, it is not a charity! The only organizations that pay taxes in most countries are for-profit businesses. Thatâs it! Charities donât!
Now, in many countries including the US, individuals and corporations can reduce some of their tax burden by giving generously to charity. (So can individuals, but unless youâre rich and giving away a shitton of money a year itâs probably not worth the extra effort.) There is a persistent (but wrong!) belief that if a business is collecting money for a charity, they can then deduct that money from their taxes. This is NOT the case. If the business gives its own money that it has earned in revenue to charity, it can deduct that. But if they ask you at the cash register if you want to donate to whatever organization, they cannot deduct your donation from their taxes because itâs your donation. You can deduct it, if you keep your receipt (though itâs almost certainly small enough not to be worth it, but the business canât.
As to their assertion that most charities are âsus,â they are wrong. Iâve had experience working with and volunteering with multiple nonprofits over the course of decades. Only a teeny-tiny proportion of charities are suspicious in any way. Most of them are extremely straightforward and desperate to tell you all about their mission and all the shit they do. And things like their budgets and where the moneyâs going are public documents. Most of their board meetings are public, unless theyâre talking about hiring/firing/staff discipline issues. Anybody can go and see exactly what theyâre doing. You give them your money, and they will do exactly what they say they will do with it. Now, you may not agree that their mission is worthwhile, and you may not agree with their tactics. But they will usually be very straightforward and honest about them.
The ones you should be suspicious about are mostly Christian charities and pregnancy support charities (which may not disclose that they are Christian because theyâre trying to trick people into thinking theyâre neutral rather than what they are, organizations to manipulate and gaslight women into keeping pregnancies they donât want). This is not to say that all Christian charities are suspicious or bad, because there are a lot of them that donât discriminate against or harm people who are queer or having sex outside of marriage or have abortions or whatever. But there are a lot of them that do discriminate, and theyâre not always upfront about it. (Itâs extremely rare, these days, to find charities that discriminate in that way unless theyâre Christian.)
There are a few non-Christian charities that are bad, but in those cases itâs really easy to find out. Just google â[charity name] controversy.â For example, googling âGoodwill controversyâ will give you all the dirt on Goodwill, which pays their CEO a large salary while paying disabled workers below-minimum-wage in states that can get away with it. Googling âAutism Speaks controversyâ immediately brings up lots of blog posts going back years from autistic people about why A$ is terrible. That takes about five seconds, itâs really easy to find out if an organization youâre thinking of giving to has a bad rep.
And the thing is, very few charities have any significant level of controversy or problems attached to them. Most are perfectly legit! Even most explicitly Christian charities! (For example: a very high proportion of food pantries and meal providing organizations are run by churches, and extremely few of them discriminate, shame people, or try to proselytize to the people theyâre feeding. Even if they wanted to--and lots of them wouldnât want to--they would lose federal funding and resources which are one of the backbones of any food pantry.)
Certain specific charities are disingenuous or not as good as they claim to be. But the vast majority of charities are open and honest about their work and how they do it, and all are required by law to be open and honest about how much money they take in and where they spend it. And even the bad apples are pretty easy to spot with a few seconds of research. The only reason to be default suspicious of charities is if you ... donât actually know anything about charities and how they work.
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