Guest post: No respectable charity would ever make that ludicrous claim
Originally a comment by Josh Spokes on More lies.
I realize this is probably obvious to many, but I want to point out another way in which he’s not only lying but doesn’t even know how to lie convincingly about this.
I’m the executive at a nonprofit charity. The kind with the IRS tax designation 501(c)(3). This is this the kind of charity where a donor can deduct the contribution from her taxes. Think the Red Cross, your local food pantry, animal shelter, educational nonprofit. Also the same designation as charities like those run by Trump or Hillary Clinton. It’s all the same beast for tax purposes:
1. No charity in the world sends 100 percent of its money to other charities, nor does it spend 100 percent of its money “on the mission.” That is not objectively possible.
2. Why? Because humans have to be paid to carry out the mission. This is why charities have staff. Only the tiniest charitable groups of maybe a few hundred or thousand active donors run entirely on volunteer support.
3. Even those few charities that are all volunteer have costs. The minute a volunteer puts a first class stamp on an envelope to send a donor a thank you letter, that’s a percentage of the charity’s money that it spent on something other than the core mission. It’s an administrative expense.
Again, it’s not possible for any charity under any circumstances to have no overhead costs.
4. No respectable charity would ever make that ludicrous claim. First because it’s not true, and second because it’s not believable. We in the nonprofit sector work hard to spend as much as we can directly on the mission and as little as possible on “administration.” But that itself is a game anyway, since the mission happens through the administrative expense of paying professionals to carry it out.
Yeah, well, it’s true now because Trump said it.
Humpty Dumpty politics.
I agree 100%.
A charity with zero costs is an unprofessional, unaccountable mess. Staying legal and publicly accountable costs money.
I’ve sat through many charitable AGMs to know that one of the largest single cost small charities can have is to be independently audited. Even though their annual turnovers were way below the threshold for 3rd party auditing, that was best practice, so that’s what was done with full support from the donors.
This article gives more nauseating back story on his foundation: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-boasts-of-his-philanthropy-but-his-giving-falls-short-of-his-words/2016/10/29/b3c03106-9ac7-11e6-a0ed-ab0774c1eaa5_story.html
But the thing about sperm be sacred is that you have to keep it in your body; let it out and it’s just disgusting. Not that that I’m doubting that the disgust of menstruation is rooted in misogyny. It’s just that at the root of that is the religiously driven disgust for all things physical.
That post should of course be on the previous post. Must learn not to post when I should be sleeping.
5. It also beings makes the organisation look crass. But then, Trump is simply crass writ large.
Reminds me of the very round, very consistent percentages thrown around by Save The Children over the past couple of decades, and the fact that they don’t like you inquiring as to how they achieved those percentages (offloading overhead to other, allied orgs, or whatever else – you don’t get any answers because they’re incredibly bunkered).