Bill and Melinda Gates together with Warren Buffett have begun a campaign to encourage the nation’s billionaires to give at least half of their fortunes to charity.
The roots of the Giving Pledge campaign can be traced to a meeting in May 2009 where Bill Gates brought together some of the nation’s wealthiest philanthropists and discussed ideas including how to encourage wealthy Americans to give more. Beginning with the Forbes list of the four hundred wealthiest Americans, the campaign will encourage the nation’s super-rich to pledge at least 50 percent of their net worth to charitable causes, either during their lifetimes or at death.
If the Forbes 400 take up this challenge, they could give an additional $600 billion or more to charity. To put that in perspective, total charitable giving in the United States has topped $300 billion in each of the last three years. According to IRS records and estimates by Fortune, the wealthiest Americans gave between 8 and 11 percent of the total adjusted income to charity in 2007.
According to Buffett, anyone who is rich has thought about what to do with his or her money. “They may not have reached a decision about that, but they have for sure thought about it,” Buffett told Fortune. “The pledge that we’re asking them to make will put them thinking about the whole issue again.”
