This is a huge red herring. Why are we going after celebrities? Unless those celebrities are Taylor Swift or Paris Hilton or any celebrity billionaire they’re on our side. The only war is class war. As someone whose net worth is negative, I have more in common with Brian Cranston and Zendaya than any of the billionaires class who we should actually be fighting.
I don’t know if OP is doing this on purpose or not but posts like this help the enemy. This kind of thing feels really suspicious. Like it’s really trying to point at left leaning actors that speak out against the billionaire class during the Oscars or whatever.
A celebrity being an advocate for a charity is honestly the very last thing on my list of problems that need to be addressed. Most Hollywood types we all know are several orders of magnitude less wealthy than our billionaire overlords. At least they’re trying to do something beneficial
Yeah maybe the average person can’t be bothered to make a distinction between billionaires and millionaires (most celebs) even though the difference happens to be 1000 to 1.
But they should, if working class solidarity matters and isn’t a one-way street.
Im Not defending the billionaires but the reason the Hollywood types are even brought up at all is they are 100 times more peachy than billionaires who just bank roll some dark money super PAC so you never actually hear from the person themselves
Like when Swift donated 1 million. It’s basically $1 for us poors. Probably way less.
This is also how round ups at checkouts like Walmart work.
That’s mostly virtue signalling.
You’re right that the corporation should be donating, but the reason they do it is to imply that they have some social responsibility when they really don’t.
I just assume they have a charity relationship that meets the minimum to not technically lying, while allowing them to just keep 90% of the money.
I always seem like an asshole, but I never round up. I used to work at a nonprofit and those collections are nothing stacked against a big 500k donation from a corp. They are mostly for awareness.
That and I don’t know what some of they are. If I donate something I like to know what it is first and that conversation isn’t going to happen. The 18 year old checkout worker is not going to enlightened me well they scan my cans of green beans.
And fuck them for taking my money, donating it, and taking the tax write off themselves
The myth that just won’t die no matter how many times it’s corrected. Every thread, every time, someone says this myth.
Not how that works.
That’s not how write offs work…
I’ve been told that’s not how it works. Mostly because you donated it, so it’s your write off. I don’t know though.
This. It’s illegal for them to take the deduction. The only way they could is if they claimed your donation as income then claimed it as a deduction, which would get them nowhere.
I’m not saying trust big companies, but on the checkout charity things I think the risk far outweighs the reward for them to cheat.
One thing I do wonder about is if they put the donated money into an account and collect interest on it before donating it. I’ve never been able to find an answer to that, but I suspect it’s the same. Big risk, little reward.
Laws don’t mean anything anymore if they’re simply not enforced and the criminals are in charge
That doesn’t mean it’s happening.
At a large corporation, there would be employees setting up the charity drive, the accounting department, probably the legal department involved. They’d need to keep track of the charity money coming in, make sure it’s not counted as charity, make sure it’s not counted as income, make sure none of the departments ask questions, pay the charity from money that is not shown as income or charity, get a receipt from the charity saying the money came from the company’s money and not the big nationwide charity drive they held for 6 months that ended last week, file taxes saying they paid X amount to charity from company money but they can’t show it coming from company money.
Not a single person involved in this would profit from it and most would be mortified at what they saw. The company would barely even profit from it. I mean, Wal-mart getting a tax deduction for a million dollars they raised for charity would probably pay for the remodeling of the deli department at one store.
This is a situation where not only are the risks not worth it, the work isn’t worth it. It’s a thousand times easier to just do it right.
It’s not really for the write off. Walmart doesn’t give a shit about your paltry pennies. It’s mostly so they get the PR and the ability to hand over a giant check and say ‘they’ raised such and such. The amount on the check will seem like a large number to idiots but it will be a relatively small number in comparison to profits etc.
You’re effectively bank rolling their advertising / good will campaign.
It was very dodgy for a while, like Woolies owned the charity you were donating to, and the name was weird too. Basically “give us extra money and we might give homeless people our expired food items instead of throwing them in the trash” so you’re paying them to deal with their own waste. But the name was like, Support Local Farmers or something I don’t remember. Then they tightened the laws, and now it’s only moderately dodgy because that money isn’t separated out properly and only a percentage of it ends up going to the charity. That’s the last I heard of it in Australia at least.
I would hope so, do they provide a tax receipt at the end of the transaction?
If you ask for a receipt, yeah.
I mean they give a few Mars bars of their own too, but they are then left with ~10000 Mars bars at the end of it.
This so how all rich people are.
I don’t know who needs to hear this, but stop allowing yourself to be persuaded by celebrities and influencers.
That’s not to say don’t help those less fortunate. But do it because you want to, and in ways that make sense to you.
Because collectively we’ve become a bunch of fucking followers, and this does the world no favors. Trust the good instincts from within yourself.
/rant
I know it’s not generally popular here on Lemmy but some scripture comes to mind: 2 Corinthians 9:7
Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.
The compulsion of celebrities and influencers would apply here I think.
Feeding the homeless on a Mars bar diet is not the solution. The homeless need a path to a healthy life.
And who keeps mars bars in the fridge?
Psycho
not quite? it would be if they pressured 10000 people each into giving half a mars bar to the homeless. they better give away their own mars bars of course, but things generally aren’t black and white.
Yes exactly it’s about their power to influence
They are damned if they do and and damned if they don’t. If they don’t then people lambast them for not utilizing their platform. If they do then they’re sticking their nose into not their business and not donating enough no matter how much they donate. There’s no way to win for them, then again being a public figure is a curse and guarantees there’s always someone who’s going to be disgruntled.
I say all publicity for a good charity is good and all giving is good. If someone makes 100K and gives 50 that’s awesome, if someone makes 40k and gives 20 that’s also awesome, all donations are good to a worthwhile cause and charity.
celebrities are not expected to solicit donations for charities. if they care about charity they should just donate from the millions they have, instead of asking poor people to do it for them.
If you can’t afford to give then don’t give. The people who give can afford to give
Well except they’re not asking poor people are they? They’re asking everybody. And it’s just an ask. If you don’t want to accommodate the request then you don’t have to, but going on the internet and publicly discouraging people from advocating for the needy just because they’re wealthy is not helping anyone, especially the needy.
