I understand where you are coming from, but I've come to find it horrible to put judgments on a donation. Am I better than the panhandler that I know what he should receive?
What should I give a panhandler?
A sandwich? Maybe he's has celliac's. Or diabetes.
A gift card to the coffee shop? Maybe he needs gloves.
Money to buy gloves and a sugar free lunch? Maybe he's an alcoholic.
Instead, just donate. Just help. Just see the person lying on the floor as a fellow human being fully deserving in dignity. If you're Christian, see Christ sprawled on the floor and make sure your right hand doesn't see your left hand.
This article is BS, and the NP does have an editorial stance I sometimes find annoying (their anti-Trudeau stance, while understandable, is becoming pathological).
But it is not ""newspaper" filled with misleading articles and half-truths." any more than any other leading Canadian newspaper.
He doesn't it at all! He, acknowledges that this is a problem, but doesn't resolve the point -that there would be less donation- against his argument.
To do that he would either have to prove that money donations would increase in lieu of canned goods and/or that the administrative costs are higher than the value of the canned goods (which maybe true for very specialized and/or very corrupt charities, but not for your local volunteer run pantry)
I donate money, food and my wife's time (time I would otherwise enjoy for myself instead of babysitting two kids)
The food is part of my pantry management. We don't eat too many canned goods, so we regularly donate it after a few months (well before expiration). We keep canned food for, among other reasons, emergencies.
Also, we buy - and therefore donate - very high quality food. Mr. NationalPost might not taste the difference, but in our family, we do. Am I any better than the poor that I get to eat the fancy stuff?
The donation of food has an aesthetic appeal - I'm literally giving sustenance and therefore life to the less fortunate. When I donate money I give the mere possibility of sustenance. Assuming the charity is honest.
I would not donate more money if I didn't donate food. I'm not homo economicus and the increased money signal from purchasing less canned goods doesn't tug on my donation levers. I.e. I don't take partial derivatives of my (woe me, undefined!) elasticity and demand functions.
I even keep wool Costco socks in my car to give out to panhandlers in the winter. Surely the $15/pack could have been put to better use! But imagine the joy of a panhandler receiving a small package from a more fortunate.
Hopper was full of it when he posted this a few years ago. He's full of it today.
" Because you can't democratize management and organization like you can with donation of individual goods and small amounts of money."
Sure you can, by volunteering on the board of directors of said charity. Like my wife does, helping organize a charity large enough that it runs a free hospital, a dental clinic and home for otherwise homeless people in a major US city.
That isn't what is meant by democratising management in the GP comment.
In my own experience, the amount of work done by said trustees/directors of a larger charity is negligable compared to the amount of work done by manager-doers who are volunteering for them.
By negligable, I'd like to quantify: Based on estimates relating to a charity I've been involved with, about 1:300 individual trustee hours to invidual working manager hours.
With those kinds of ratios, the trustees/directors are not really doing the management. They are more like a consultation committee, who sign off on big things or take responsibility for major official decisions from time to time.
What's meant by democratising management is getting rid of the working managers, and leaving all of that work to a democratic group - ie the trustees, or the volunteer labour force as a larger democracy.
Non-profits vary greatly, so I wouldn't like to presume how much work your wife does, but in charities operating with numbers like I've just described, handing over the work done by the working managers to either the trustees (who have 1/300th the time available), or the volunteer labour force (who mean well but are not doing it professionally, and probably not full time), would usually result in the charity disastrously failing to deliver on its mission.
(I have worked for a different non-profit, where time-consuming tensions between people who wanted things to be done more democratically (i.e. a lot more talking and reporting, and inappropriate privacy violations), and people actually putting in a lot of hours and barely keeping it running while providing enough deliverables to its sponsors, to retain critical things like a building to operate in, ultimately broke down, with neither the democracy-loving-but-doing-only-a-litte-work people happy, nor the sponsors, nor the people putting in hard volunteer work in the hope of its mission continuing, nor even the recipients of services (because it couldn't deliver the best under those circumstances). The service users were glad it existed, but they didn't know how much better it could have been. So, based on experience, I'm rather cautious about recommending democracy as an approach for new charitable social enterprises, if you need to deliver real, substantial services - it helps with some things, and causes tremendous, even surprising, problems with some others. I'd take more care structuring it, if doing it again.)
Living in the Midwest on a Midwest salary ($85k/yr), currently 30 years old, have 3 kids, a stay at home wife, and a net worth that just peeked over $250k.
Also, our work health insurance is shit, so $200 gets taken out of my paycheck each week for that, which puts it right around the $12k you mentioned.
Daycare is stupid expensive. Healthcare is stupid expensive. We handle the former by having my wife stay home. The latter is just an unfortunate fact of life.
I really don't know how much it costs to live on the coasts, but on a developer salary you can live very comfortably in the Midwest (Ames, Iowa here).
A single-income family with children and a stay-at-home parent isn't an unfortunate fact of life, it's a stable economic and social arrangement that promotes health and welfare of children, giving them a strong prospect for future success.
So you are saying if you have a non-fatal health incident then you are in serious financial trouble?
My wife and I are in the same position. We pay $209 a month for “healthcare” coverage that has a $700 yearly deductible. If either of us got sick or injuries we would be totally screwed. The US system is broken. We have massive wealth inequality, an educational system in crisis, and a toxic political system.
I assume by $700 you mean $7000? Also wondering if your $209 / month figure was accurate. What your comment currently describes is 1/4 the premium and 1/10th the deductible that my family has.
I agree that healthcare in the US is completely broken. It is in fact one of my favorite things to gripe about to anyone who will listen or who happens to be in my vicinity at the wrong moment.
I think our current "out of pocket max" is somewhere around $6k/year. The bill for having twins blew through that pretty well. When we had our first child, our deductible was roughly twice as much and I think we maybe just scratched the out of pocket max. Those insurance premiums were only a third of what we pay now though, which was a better trade off in my opinion.
Would we be financially ruined by running into something like that again? No. Would we be majorly inconvenienced? Yes.
What should I give a panhandler?
A sandwich? Maybe he's has celliac's. Or diabetes.
A gift card to the coffee shop? Maybe he needs gloves.
Money to buy gloves and a sugar free lunch? Maybe he's an alcoholic.
Instead, just donate. Just help. Just see the person lying on the floor as a fellow human being fully deserving in dignity. If you're Christian, see Christ sprawled on the floor and make sure your right hand doesn't see your left hand.