What Impact Could Our Giving Have?
Excerpted from “A New Take on Tithing” by Claude Rosenberg and Tim Stone, Fall 2006
Malnutrition, illiteracy, disease – the problems of the world often seem insurmountable. But we see grounds for hope. According to our calculations, individual charitable donations in the United States alone could increase more than $25 billion a year if affluent households donated as high a proportion of their assets to charity as do the middle class and those below... If affluent donors gave as much as we think they could afford, based on our conservative donation benchmarks, charitable giving in the U.S. would rise by about $100 billion per year.
To put these numbers in perspective, consider a recent analysis of how much money it would take to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems. According to the Borgen Project, annual expenditures of $19 billion between now and 2015 could eliminate global starvation and malnutrition. Another $12 billion per year over that same time period could provide education for every child on earth. And an additional $15 billion each year could provide universal access to clean water and sanitation. In other words, three of the world’s most pressing problems could be solved in less than a decade if our nation’s affluent stepped up to the plate. And there would still be another $46 billion left over to tackle other causes.
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