Working-age Americans who make $50,000 to $100,000 a year are two to six times more generous in one measure of the gifts they give to charity than Americans who make more than $10 million, a pioneering study of federal tax data shows.
In comparing investment assets with charitable giving, the least generous of all working- age Americans in 2003, the latest year for which Internal Revenue Service data is available, were among the young and prosperous – the 285 taxpayers age 35 and under who made more than $10 million – and the 18,600 taxpayers making $500,000 to $1 million.
The top group had on average $101 million of investment assets to $2.4 million for the other group.
On average, these two groups made charitable gifts equal to 0.4 percent of their assets, while people the same age who made $50,000 to $100,000 gave gifts equal to more than 2.5 percent of their investment assets, six times that of their far wealthier peers.
Investment assets include the value of stocks, bonds and other investments held in the tax system. Excluded from this are retirement accounts, generally held outside the tax system, personal property such as furniture and art, and equity in homes.
The IRS data was analyzed by the NewTithing Group, a San Francisco-based philanthropic research organization that since 1998 has been encouraging the most prosperous Americans to give more.
Among those 35 and younger, those making less than $200,000 made gifts equal to 1.87 percent of their assets, a figure that fell to 0.5 percent for the 189,000 taxpayers making $200,000 to $10 million and to 0.4 percent for the 285 taxpayers making more than $10 million.
More online: Charitable giving report. www.newtithing.org