How Much Is Enough? Michael Moore, Warren Buffett, and "Class War"

March 11, 2011 by Greg Garrett

Continued from Page 2

The richest Americans, according to Fortune, give away something like 11 percent of their income each year, a little more than tithing one-tenth of their incomes. Of the 38,000 families filing estate taxes in 2008, roughly four-fifths of them left no charitable bequest at their deaths. So there is plenty of room for those who don't need all their money to give to those who suffer, those who struggle, those who starve . . . particularly as the millionaires in Congress try to cut social aid programs and sustain tax cuts that might fund those programs.

Now, as Fortune notes of the Gates/Buffett philanthropy crusade, "The question is how many people of wealth will buy their argument." Yes.

But our two richest Americans want to encourage their brothers and sisters lauded for their wealth in Forbes that $600 billion dollars worth of radical philanthropy—what Glenn Beck and others could only see as a mammoth redistribution of wealth—is the just thing to do.

And the Christian tradition convinces me that they are right.

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Mainline Protestant

Faithful Citizenship

Budget

Mainline Protestantism

Taxes

Wealth

Christianity

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About Greg Garrett

Greg Garrett is (according to BBC Radio) one of America's leading voices on religion and culture. He is the author or co-author of over twenty books of fiction, theology, cultural criticism, and spiritual autobiography. His most recent books are The Prodigal, written with the legendary Brennan Manning, Entertaining Judgment: The Afterlife in Popular Imagination, and My Church Is Not Dying: Episcopalians in the 21st Century. A contributor to Patheos since 2010, Greg also writes for the Huffington Post, Salon.com, OnFaith, The Tablet, Reform, and other web and print publications in the US and UK.

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