Posted on 08/04/2010 8:12:34 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Thirty-four U.S. billionaires pledged Wednesday to give away at least 50 percent of their wealth to charity as part of a campaign by investor Warren Buffett and Microsoft founder Bill Gates.
Among the billionaires joining the campaign are New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, entertainment executive Barry Diller, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, energy tycoon T. Boone Pickens, media mogul Ted Turner, David Rockefeller and investor Ronald Perelman.
Gates and Buffett launched "The Giving Pledge" in June to convince hundreds of U.S. billionaires to give away most of their fortune during their lifetime or after their death
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
The fourth entry is:
“Eli and Edy the Broad”
I don’t know much about Edy, but I cannot believe her husband talks about her that way in public.
That said, I think that Warren Buffet has been very much in favor of programs that increase the taxes of people far less wealth than he is.
I wonder why, then, he wants to donate his money (and take a charitable deduction) his wealth to charity.
It seems to me that he should consider GIVING his money to the Federal Government. Let's see him willingly give his money to the Federal Government so that the Government can determine how his money should be spent.
The usual far left, slavery-supporting socialist ones.
Dear Billionaires,
Please send me a check and a good job.
RE: Eli and Edy the Broad
The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard was founded with a $100 million donation to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from Broad and his wife, Edythe, in 2003. In 2005, the couple donated another $100 million to Harvard. On 4 September 2008 the Broads gave another $400 million to the Broad Institute. The endowment will be managed by Harvard’s investment unit.[1]
Eli Broad donated $23.2 million towards the Broad Art Center at UCLA, and another $20 million to UCLA Stem Cell Institute.[2]
Eli and Edythe Broad are the founders of The Broad Foundations,[3] with the mission of advancing entrepreneurship for the public good in education, science and the arts. The Broad Foundations, which include The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation and The Broad Art Foundation, have assets of $2.1 billion. The Broad Foundations Internet address is www.broadfoundation.org.
The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation’s education work is focused on dramatically improving urban K-12 public education through better governance, management, labor relations and competition. The Broad Foundation has four national flagship initiatives:
The $2 million Broad Prize for Urban Education is the nations largest education award given annually to urban school districts that have made the greatest overall performance and improvement in student achievement.[4]
The Broad Superintendents Academy is a 10-month executive management program to train working CEOs and other top executives from business, non-profit, military, government and education backgrounds to lead urban school systems.[5]
The Broad Residency in Urban Education is a two-year management development program that trains recent graduate students, primarily with business and law degrees, who have several years of work experience and places them immediately into managerial positions in the central operations of urban school districts.[6]
The Broad Institute for School Boards is a national training and support program for urban school district governance teams of school board members and superintendents. The latest offering of The Broad Institute is Reform Governance in Action, a training program for reform-minded school board-superintendent teams to establish efficient and effective policies and processes that will improve board operations, strengthen management oversight and directly improve learning opportunities for students.
Ben Franklin left his fortune to the city of Boston to establish The Franklin Institute. A technical school that still turns out people that perform real jobs. Andrew Carnegie established most libraries.
Gee what a terrible sacrifice, aren’t they just so wonderful. Lets see, if they have 10 billion dollars, and give away 50%, they will ONLY have 5 billion dollars left....yes this is the material of which great martyrs are made.
If they gave it nearly all away and left themselves with a meager 60k per year stipend, then that would impress me.
Giving is good of course, but making a big show of your giving is not, its self aggrandizement.
Even liberal billionaires are no so stupid as to believe that the government won’t piss it away. No, they will create endowments that other liberals will run in order to promote liberalism and the enslavement of mankind.
If you love abortion, yes, March of Dimes is the charity to give money to.
I do not see this as wonderful. We need billionaires. All this indicates is another sapping of wealth from U. S. citizens. Gates and company will dump the funds. Those funds will be spent on idiotic projects or give-aways, and in two years we’ll be right back where we started, with billionaires having halved their wealth, those in need still there with their hand out.
Stupid idea IMO.
I have never in my life seen more promotions for people to donate funds to a good cause. Many of these projects are leftist pipe dreams. It’s my take that some of them are legit, and others are there to fleece the wealth out of our nation.
Some of the funds go to good causes, and a lot of it is diverted to leftist projects. What do you want to bet concerns like ACORN and others don’t see some of these funds along the way.
Who manages these projects? ACORN, some other leftist entities?
There is a full blown effort to take this nation down, and I see the fleecing of our citizens, to be part of that process.
We’re talking hundreds of millions if not billions from our citizens, and that’s not even touching on Gates and company. These funds would be better spent on investments, and things that make this nation grow.
Instead we’re being urged to give it away to the third world and such. Some, okay. This much, I think we’re being played.
>>> I wonder exactly what charities will receive these funds.
If you read the fine print, I suspect most of this “charity” will be in the form of funding new versions of institutions like the Ford Foundation.
They money is protected from most taxation, they get enormous personal and estate deductions, and the funds are administered by their highly paid nominees (such as grandchildren) to pay out only small portions of the income of the trust. The trust itself growing over time.
Great. That is their money, they can do what they want with it. Why not extend that freedom to everyone who earns money? Keep it OR give it away: your CHOICE.
< /obvious>
Mostly left wing causes from Gates & Buffett , so far.
Gates has wasted billions.
Did they change their stance?
March of Dimes, IIRC, used to be [very much] for helping premature babies.
Wyck: They had more than some monies. Many, many monies. And they planned to give a sizable portion of their estate to you and Susan after the wedding.
George: And now?
Wyck: Not. It’s all been endowed to the foundation, even this townhouse.
George: This townhouse?
Wyck: This would have been your wedding gift.
George: And now?
Wyck: Not.
Yeah, that’s right give it away, stupid fools.
Why not pool your billions and support space
based applications, we need a reliable safe
transport to orbit, that would be a worthy
gift to mankind!
They can do what they want with their money, but it will mostly be wasted because they will rely on “experts” that will channel the funds to liberals. It almost always happens. Gates is a good example. He has spent a fortune on improving government schools. Like a thoughtless techie, he assumed that there were university “experts” who had a body of technical knowledge that just needed to be infused into the system. The money went to the “pedagogical fads du jour”, and the result was epic failure. Good thing for Gates that he doesn’t know that mothers in the hills of Tennessee without high school diplomas and who wear unstylish clothing are producing educational results that would humiliate Lakeside - Gates’ ever-so-expensive and exclusive prep school alma mater. Moreover, the mothers are doing it on a financial shoestring.
The Ford Foundation is a VERY leftist organization. I wouldn’t give them a dime. Many of these types of organizations are not exactly what they seem. They fund some absolutely atrocious concerns that would make your blood boil of you knew about it.
It’s been some time since I’ve seen the exact concerns, or I’d give you some examples, but I was aghast as some of the things I have seen them fund.
Done for notoriety. Not how giving is supposed to be done.
How about giving it all to the Federal Government?
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