It is not. The people of the United States give not only the most money to charity in the world per capita, but also score very highly on World Giving Index (we are #2), which accounts for time spent helping others and working for charitable organizations. We are a very charity oriented country.
I've always heard that that's predominantly religious giving, but never actually looked to see whether that's true til now.
It turns out, it is:
> Historically, Religious groups have received the largest share of charitable donations. This remained true in 2016. With the 2.9% increase in donations this year, 31% of all donations, or $127.37 billion, went to Religious organizations. Much of these contributions can be attributed to people giving to their local place of worship.
> In 2016, the majority of charitable dollars went to religion (32%), education (16%), human services (12%), grantmaking foundations (11%), and health (9%).
So Americans technically give a lot to charity, but it's mostly to tax-advantaged local religious institutions, who may or may not be doing anything with that; I'm sure some churches do something for their local community to merit that tax advantage, but I'm sure others don't. There's a lot of big buildings out there with crosses on them.
It is a tithe because it is a percentage of income that goes to the church. But it’s implemented through a tax collected by the government and withheld from paychecks. It would be unconstitutional in the U.S., but it’s a thing in Germany and some Scandinavian countries.
You mean the churches that, in turn, use that money to help their communities in a charitable way? I doubt that would surprise anyone anywhere in the world, since it happens everywhere.
This is a thing I've seen said a lot, but I'm curious if it's been studied. And I don't mean this as snark, but has anyone looked at what kind of "good works" churches do for their local communities?
I'm very curious to know whether our government (state, local, etc) is getting a fair exchange for the tax benefits of being a church.
> And I don't mean this as snark, but has anyone looked at what kind of "good works" churches do for their local communities?
Well - some of them provide political platforms to inform their members who to vote for. I think the IRS looked into this at one point, though it didn't go that well [1].
[1]: To this day, it's claimed that it was partisan and targeted only one party, when in fact all non-profits were looked into; it was just that certain non-profits, which attracted members of mainly one party, were the ones mostly engaging in such practices. That party, of course, made sure the IRS didn't have somebody (by not confirming anyone to the position - which is still the same today) to look into this issue; without that person, the law has no teeth, and they can continue to (illegally) promote their own politicians, in violation of the law for non-profit organizations. But they claim "free speech" rights and "religious freedom" rights...
Many replies are vouching for churches, but while religious community work is certainly beneficial to selected parties, it's only a little better than other forms of private philanthropy in that the services are selected by a limited number of participants, to benefit a limited number of participants, rather than democratically as a government would do. [-1]
For example, in cases like the Salvation Army, a portion of donated money goes toward lobbying against certain types of free speech. And they have been caught many times discriminating against LGBTQ. [0]
[-1] Not that governments are uniformly perfect. They are at least beholden to the majority at numerous pressure points, unlike churches.
And some of that goes out to support their surrounding communities by feeding/clothing homeless, supporting foster children, cleaning up yards for the elderly, paying people's rent, etc. A lot of churches don't require people to members in order to receive this help.
There are estimates that the Catholic Church spends around 3% of turnover on charity - which is far less than most charitable organisations do, and certainly far less than it could afford to.
Given the age slant of its members a lot of donations are collected from the elderly, many of whom can realistically be considered poor themselves.
The US has the highest level of wealth inequality in the world, so assuming that the ultra-rich donate more, their impact should be higher in the US than anywhere else.
I think I want income inequality. Wealth inequality might be totally meaningless as wealth is guesstimate not exact value usually, e.g. look here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_distribut..., is hard to say anything at all from Gini Wealth. Zimbabwe and Denmark can be compared by Gini index but that's completely nonsensical result: one corrupt and one happiest country in the world.
I have mentioned law of large numbers because of population size, however rich ultra-rich might be that can't skew results in USA.
