 Thank you so much Chuck, thank you Thea, thank you the organizers of this conference. I have to say this has been quite an amazing day. The speakers as everybody knows have just been extraordinary but the seldom have I been at a conference where the attendees have been as interesting and important and doing such compelling work as the speakers and it's just been a fantastic day. So thank you so much. Wonderful to be a part of it. Because I want everyone to be able to focus on my comments in the next six minutes, I don't want people to be distracted by thoughts. Is she or isn't she? Not related. It was a little gift from Ellis Island that's the gift that keeps on giving. Okay, so my topic today is about philanthropy. And the topic is called corrupting philanthropy, fixing the rules to curb billionaire influence. And I want to start by talking about this idea of what is philanthropy, right? What is philanthropy? Because as Chuck was saying, we have this idea that philanthropy is this kind of just fantastic sort of hazy glow, what the rich people are doing for the rest of us. And a lot of times it's true, a lot of good things happen through philanthropy and we're gonna talk about that. But I want to dig a little bit more deeply into this. So first let's start with the, what I will call the popular conception of philanthropy and we all know what it starts with. This guy or somebody like it, right? Very rich person, anybody know who that is? What, Uncle Pennybags from Monopoly? Yes, he's very, very rich and he's not just rich. He's giving his money away, okay? And he's gonna give, and this is what we see as philanthropy, right? It's a very rich person. They give their money and they give their money to charitable causes. So here we have education, arts institutions, scientific research, healthcare, all these important things. There's so many more we could add. Charitable organizations do so much important work including organizations in this room. So, and in this way we see philanthropy as an act of generosity. We see it as an act of private giving and we see it as something that sometimes acts as a form of wealth distribution, right? Single rich person takes this wealth and shares it for the betterment of all of us. And I think what's important to know is how strongly this vision of philanthropy takes hold in people's minds and causes the general public to have certain attitudes about philanthropy. One is that other people's philanthropic giving is not really our business, right? If somebody chooses to set up a trust for the benefit of dogs like Leona Helmsley did or they wanna give huge amounts of money to an already well, well-endowed prep school, you know, that's their business, not our business. And what I wanna do is talk today about how the story is in fact a little bit more complicated than how this story appears. And that's because this isn't really an accurate and full depiction of philanthropy. If we wanna get the full depiction of philanthropy, we have to start with two donors. It's the donor of the Uncle Penny bags or whatever our rich person is and it's the donor of the American taxpayer because of our availability of tax benefits for charitable giving, the American taxpayer is a partner in every charitable gift that receives tax benefits. Now that means everybody in this room. So when somebody decides to give money for the benefit of dogs or they give money to a school that's already overfunded, it's not just their money they're spending, they're also spending our money. How much do you think that we kick in for these gifts? Anybody wanna guess? 50%, 40%, up to 74%. And that's because the income tax benefits are 37%. But if somebody, that's if somebody makes a contribution of cash and then they get a 37% gift. But anybody who's in the know, knows that you don't make a contribution of cash. This group might not know, this may not be as smart as this group is, you might not be the financiers, but I suspect some of the funders in this room know because then you only get that 37% benefit but you can get an additional benefit of up to 20% if you give appreciated property because you also avoid capital gains on that property. So that gets us from 37% up to 57%, assuming you have highly appreciated property. Add on top of that the fact that there's an unlimited estate and gift tax exception, which would, if somebody makes a transfer of death, it would say 40%, but here we don't wanna do double counting so by the time you apply to the net taxes it gets us up to 74%, okay? So what that means is that when rich person makes a gift of $10 million, they're only spending 2.6 million of their own money. They're spending 7.4 million of ours. That means we need to all care what happens with that money. Do I really only have one minute left? Okay, good. So how we're spending this money matters, right? Because this is our money. I wanna talk about a couple of issues that come up. So sometimes these charities are not doing great work. Sometimes they're actually doing affirmatively harmful activities, right? You have the people that are pushing for supply side economics, or people who are pushing for anti-vaccination policies. Those are charities. You have people that are pushing anti-Muslim hate groups. Those are charitable organizations, right? So there's a lot of bad things that happen in the charitable world, which is something we might be concerned about. The other thing is that even legitimate charities raise concern because of the tendency for wealthy people to give to a small number of elite institutions that tend to concentrate power amongst the wealthy rather than disperse it. There's been some interesting work about that. And like the old joke about the two women in the cat skills and one woman complains that the food is terrible, to which her friend responds, I know, and the portions are so small. That too is a problem with philanthropy because increasingly, we don't actually have the gifts going directly to charitable organizations. Instead, oh, that's the littlest contribution is 26. Instead, we have the money going to charitable intermediaries, private foundations and donor advice funds. These are essentially ways that a wealthy person puts their money aside for future charitable spending, but they don't have to wait to get their tax benefits. They get their tax benefits as soon as the money goes in. Now you might say, well, when's the money gonna come out? They decide. The donor decides because in fact, our rules provide no requirements that the money come out. First of all, donor advice funds have no payout requirement at all. So you get all the tax benefits upfront. I don't have time to talk about donor advice funds, but I'd like to. And the other is that private foundations, you might say, no, private foundations have a 5% payout requirement. However, people can meet the 5% payout requirement by making a contribution to a donor advice fund, think of it as a charitable checking account, from which there is no further payout requirement, okay? So we have no payout requirements from these entities. All right, so I want to just make two points about possible paths forward. First of all, there is room for improvement in our system. I think it's very difficult to push for rules that would try to define what's a good charity and what's a bad charity. I think it would be a losing battle to do that. However, I think it's a winning battle to try to tie charitable tax benefits with money actually getting to charity. And there's a lot of people interested in promoting those types of rules. The problem is, and I suggest that we put forth a proposal, there's a number of proposals that one could have, and I'm happy to talk to anyone about how to address those situations. Proposing payout requirements, things like that. However, a big problem is going to be who is going to push for these policies. Under our system, the organizations that are harmed by these rules that have the accumulation are the non-profits. However, the spokespeople for the non-profits are not, the spokes do not represent the interests of the charities themselves. They represent the interests of the donors. And therefore, they are consistently pushing for a legislative agenda that gives more powers to donors. No payout requirement. Do you, it's their money, let us decide. We know best how to spend it or not spend it, right? So it's very important that people in this room, progressives, join the battle that philanthropy be required to put those resources to active charitable use. Because otherwise we're just giving huge concentrations of power and wealth, all at our expense, right? This is, we are paying for this and we are getting nothing for it. So I urge people to join with me and others in promoting this agenda and I thank you very much.