In Billionaires’ Pledge, Critics See Dark Cloud Instead of Silver Lining

After 40 U.S. billionaires promise to give away at least half of their fortunes to charity, can the glass still appear half empty?

It can, according to a roundup of gloomy accounts of this months’ billionaires’ pledge by the Atlantic Wire.

Although careful to praise the intent of the pledge and its signers, critics are voicing concerns about the effort’s “echoes of robber-baron philanthropy in the Gilded Age.” One even suggests an alternative pledge for the ultra-wealthy: ponying up their full tax bills on time and committing to better business practices.

The Stanford University professor Robert Reich calls the donations admirable in a post on Salon but says the pledge is a troubling reminder “about how much money is now concentrated in so few hands.”

Similarly, Steven Pearlstein writes in The Washington Post that the pledge “has raised the bar on social responsibility even as it raises questions about the social value of large personal fortunes.”

In The Wall Street Journal, Evan Newmark calls the pledge a “nearly cartoonish PR exercise” similar to the workers-unite kind of rhetoric he noted in a recent speech by President Obama to union leaders. And he wonders whether it is a coincidence that the pledge was announced on the same day that the Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner made another case against tax cuts for the wealthy.

Speaking of taxes, Peter Wilby worries in The Guardian about charitable deductions, even as he welcomes and applauds the billionaires’ pledges. He says that with such deductions, Americans not only give up billions of dollars in potential revenue for the government coffers but also hand over to the wealthy too much say over the country’s charitable priorities.

“If the rich really wish to create a better world,” Mr. Wilby writes, “they can sign another pledge: to pay their taxes on time and in full; to stop lobbying against taxation and regulation; to avoid creating monopolies; to give their employees better wages, pensions, job protection, and working conditions; to make goods and use production methods that don’t kill or maim or damage the environment or make people ill.”