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Black Eye for the Red Cross

posted by CoolHand on Sunday June 07 2015, @08:02AM   
from the red-flag dept.

bradley13 writes:

After seeing problems with the Red Cross response local storm relief (example: 40% of available emergency vehicles used for press conferences), reporter Laura Sullivan decided to look into what happened in Haiti, where the American Red Cross collected a whopping $500 million in donations.

Her report is damning. The largest proportion of these were to go into housing. The Red Cross built...wait for it...six houses. In one area where the Red Cross promised to spend $24 million, and even printed a brochure exclaiming over all that they accomplished, the local residents are unaware of any Red Cross activity.

Meanwhile the Red Cross refuses to provide more than a very high level overview of their projects. No financial figures are provided that would allow one to figure out how much of that $500 million was actually spent on relief, and where the rest of it went.

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Original Submission

• Re:You don't understand charity. Re:You don't understand charity. (Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Sunday June 07 2015, @12:37PM

  by maxwell demon (1608) on Sunday June 07 2015, @12:37PM (#193246) Journal

  You are not subtracting the amount from the taxes, you are subtracting it from the taxable income. So if your tax is 40%, and you spend $1 million to a charity, your taxable income decreases by that $1 million, and therefore your tax decreases by 40% of those $1 million, or $400,000. In other words, you still have $600,000 less than you would have had if you just had taxed that money.

  --
  The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.

  Parent

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• Re:You don't understand charity. Re:You don't understand charity. (Score: 3, Insightful) by TheRaven on Sunday June 07 2015, @04:30PM

  by TheRaven (270) on Sunday June 07 2015, @04:30PM (#193285) Journal

  That's assuming that you're giving money. If you're donating other forms of asset then you deduct at the full valuation of the asset, even if you couldn't possibly liquidate it for that value.

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  sudo mod me up

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  • Re:You don't understand charity. Re:You don't understand charity. (Score: 2) by isostatic on Sunday June 07 2015, @05:41PM

    by isostatic (365) on Sunday June 07 2015, @05:41PM (#193305) Journal

    Now this is where it makes sense, but if you can't liquidate at that level it's not clearly not worth that, so surely that would be fraud

    Parent

    • Re:You don't understand charity. (Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Sunday June 07 2015, @05:43PM

      by Joe Desertrat (2454) on Sunday June 07 2015, @05:43PM (#193306)

      Now this is where it makes sense, but if you can't liquidate at that level it's not clearly not worth that, so surely that would be fraud

      That is why they are working so hard to dismantle the ability of the IRS to investigate fraud.

      Parent