Reader Kevin writes:

I send a few donations to Wounded Warriors, Boys Town, an Indian school in Montana and a few others along with RMN a few times a year. There are some, so called "Christian" organizations (Voice of the Martyrs) that have a high overhead with a significant part of donations going to "overhead." I don't send them a lot of money. $10, $15-$25 or so.

I started getting rather amused by the "$19 a month, we'll send you this lovely t-shirt crowd." Here is an interesting article that may shed light on that.

https://www.marketplace.org/2022/01/13/why-do-tv-commercials-for-charities-ask-for-19-a-month/

They expect you'll round up to $20 or more a month. I usually don't donate to those "charities'" that apparently have a large enough operating budget to advertise on the tube or YouTube. I have gotten some very nice thank you letters from whom I choose to donate.

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Reader AC writes:

Thank you so much for putting this out there as I too have had the same thoughts about all of these charities. And because of being ill with a bad cold and flu over this Christmas holiday, I found myself watching more TV and being inundated with commercial after commercial (with the same ones repeating over and over again) that were repeatedly asking me for a $19 per month donation. I also noticed that the St Jude commercials ran with two different names and locations of where to send your donation, which did not make any sense to me as to why, for the same charity there would be two different input collection sites for contributions. Since the commercials were basically the same, what were they testing?

Anyway, I also have to question all of the fund raising for disabled veterans by so many different groups. And while I fully believe veterans deserve to be well cared for and to have their needs met, why is it that the government is not providing all of the needed support to the disabled veterans? Why is it that on top of all of the taxes being paid by the tax paying public that should be fully funding the Veteran's Administration, that the public is also further needed to donate privately to fill this huge void in services and care that apparently is not being fully met by our government through the VA services? And again, every one of these groups wants just $19 per month from all of us.

And so are these veterans groups all a scam too? I learned a long time ago that charities are a great way to commit fraud on the public. The big ones like the Red Cross proved long ago that only a tiny fraction of what they collect in donations goes for the actual cause and that the bulk of the money goes to executive salaries and for continuing the fund raising operations... It's all a self-perpetuating scam with government support via the nonprofit filing status that they are allowed to exist under.

Maybe there should be an independent vetting group that investigates and reviews the annual filings of nonprofit groups and publishes their findings and exposes those charities that are in it only for the money and for the self-enrichment of their principals... which I think maybe describes the majority of them.

And another thing, what exactly does it take to establish and maintain a nonprofit status? And how is it that a multibillion dollar operation such as the NFL (National Football League) has the status of and operates as a nonprofit entity???

Why must sports be subsidized as a charity? We as the tax paying public are forced to pay for the local stadiums where these wealthy people make their money (and so much of it) that they can afford to pay out huge million dollar salaries to the club owners and also to top players, including ones like that $700 Million contract just given to a single baseball player. But we, the average person (including some who maybe never even go to see a game) get stuck with the cost to build and maintain the stadium. This is welfare for the rich... and there is no other way to describe this!

And besides all that, a guy could easily go broke paying out all of those $19 per month donations.