In San Francisco, a retired money manager named Claude Rosenberg has founded a small organization called New Tithing Group. It tries to persuade Americans to base their charitable giving on their assets as well as their income, given how many now have substantial assets.
And using tax returns, NewTithing has put together a devilish ranking of the 50 states.
It began by estimating the liquid assets of households with more than $200,000 in annual income, counting cash, stocks, bonds and the like, but not houses or retirement accounts. Then, with the same federal tax data, it calculated what percentage of those assets the households have given to charity, on average, in recent years.
Nebraska ranked third, with its affluent residents giving away just over 1 percent of their assets each year. That does not include the state's most famous donation, Warren E. Buffett's huge gift to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation this year, which came too late to be counted in the ranking.
The only States ahead of Nebraska were Utah (where the Mormon Church asks members to donate 10 percent of their incomes) and Oklahoma, while Minnesota and Georgia came next.
[Excerpt of an article by David Leonhardt, The New York Times]
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