“Stop Kidding Ourselves”: Charity is No Substitute for Economic Rights

This piece originally appeared on Fran Quigley’s blog Housing Is A Human Right on February 20, 2026.

I am sure that virtually all of the readers of this newsletter donate to charities or volunteer for them--or both. Me too.

That is a good thing. Unless, that is, we delude ourselves into thinking charity is a real substitute for fully-enforceable economic rights.

Thanks to Jacobin for publishing a version of this article by me earlier this month. You can read the Jacobin version on their site here, or in full below:

For many years, my home state of Indiana provided very limited access to Medicaid, a deadly state of affairs that still exists in the ten states that have stubbornly refused to accept Affordable Care Act funds to expand the program. For many applicants in those settings, their only path to healthcare is meeting an onerous standard for proving they are disabled.

When residents of our state still faced that hurdle, our law school clinic often represented clients in appeals of Medicaid denials. They had severe illnesses and limitations, but their applications for help paying for prescribed medicine and care had been rejected by the state agency.

Once, one of my legal services colleagues helped a woman pull together reams of evidence about her chronic pain and her struggles to afford medication and therapy. Together, they presented it to a judge who was hearing the appeal of the state agency’s decision denying her Medicaid. The judge somewhat impatiently listened to all the testimony and glanced at the records in front of him, then promptly denied her request. The woman rushed from the courtroom in tears.

Her lawyer started packing up his files. The judge lingered for a moment and broke from his stoic demeanor. “It really is too bad what she is going through,” he said to my colleague. “Isn’t there some kind of program out there to help people like her?”

Since he had just blocked her access to the government program designed to help her, it was clear the judge was referring to a charity program. The answer was no. It still is.

This woman, like millions of others, was in need of years of assistance with expensive medicines, provider visits, and procedures. Like long-term affordable housing and subsistence incomes, virtually no charity provides that level of support. But the judge is just one of many people in the U.S. who assume that there must be a “program out there,” a charity that will meet the needs of those who are struggling.

Alone among wealthy industrialized nations, the U.S. has refused to address our poverty crisis through enforceable economic rights. (I have written about the need for the U.S. to commit to economic rights in a detailed academic article and a more brief article. ) Why is the U.S. such an outlier in ignoring economic rights? One big reason is that we are also a global anomaly in our collective delusion about the power of individual charity to address human suffering.

This is not a new trait. Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835 marveled at the American predilection for creating voluntary organizations to “to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools.” Modern-day presidents from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama venerated voluntarism and created institutions to promote it. Half of U.S. households report donating to charity, and one in every 10 U.S. workers is employed by a nonprofit organization.

Even more significantly, every person in the U.S. de facto funds rich people’s charity. The indirect government subsidy of income tax deductions for charitable contributions is substantial, amounting to $52 billion in foregone government revenue in 2022, nearly all of it to the tax benefit of wealthy individuals. That is nearly twice the amount U.S. federal and state governments spent in the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program that year.

The U.S. tax code’s definition of charity is so broad that this subsidy is available for donations to college sports programs, political think tanks, and elite private schools where wealthy donors attended and/or their children attend. In fact, less than one-third of the money U.S. individuals donate to nonprofits is focused on the needs of the economically disadvantaged. As Rob Reich, Stanford political science professor and author of Just Giving: Why Philanthropy is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better, concludes, “We should stop kidding ourselves that charity and philanthropy do much to help the poor.”

“A Moral Safety Valve”

Meanwhile, government entitlement programs like SNAP, Medicaid, and Social Security, even without meeting all basic needs, are credited with lifting forty-five million people out of poverty annually. Before the Social Security monthly benefit was expanded in the 1960’s, more than one in every three U.S. seniors lived in poverty. Expansion reduced the senior poverty rate to 10%. The child tax credit expansion in response to the COVID pandemic cut child poverty nearly in half.

By contrast, even well-meaning charitable efforts come up well short. In a Harvard Political Review essay entitled “Why Charity Can Never Be More Than a Band-Aid,” Emory Paul wrote that his experience leading a nonprofit assisting homeless people taught him a hard lesson. “We were able to supply people unhoused on the street with meals and backpacks, but we will never be able to truly address the myriad of societal issues — including systemic racism, affordable housing shortages, lack of government benefits, predatory capitalist practices, and policy failures — that led them there in the first place,” he writes.

Paul also highlights charity’s role in perpetuating inequality. Charity is rife with plutocratic bias, since tax policy gives free rein to wealthy individuals and corporations to choose projects that often serve their own public relations agendas more than community needs. Splashy announcements of billionaire and corporate donations are designed to distract attention from—and mute outrage about--the exploitation that created the mountains of privately-held wealth, only a fraction of it given away.

Vida Dutton Scudder called philanthropy “a sedative to the public conscience.” (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

In fact, observers from philosophers to social workers have long argued that philanthropy is not only ineffective at alleviating poverty, it quite often exacerbates and justifies it. Vida Dutton Scudder, the early 20th century socialist educator and activist who is honored with a feast day by the Episcopal Church U.S.A., called philanthropy “a sedative to the public conscience.” Fundraising efforts only “squeezed a little more reluctant money from comfortable classes, who groaned and gave but changed not one iota,” Scudder said.

“The alms given to a naked man in the street do not fulfill the obligations of the state, which owes to every citizen a certain subsistence, a proper nourishment, convenient clothing, and a kind of life not incompatible with health,” said Baron de Montesquieu, the French judge and philosopher whose writings influenced the founders of the U.S. Famously, St Augustine was more direct: “Charity is no substitute for justice withheld.”

Building on Vida Dutton Scudder’s metaphor about charity numbing the public to the injustice of inequality, sociologist Janet Poppendieck argues that widespread U.S. charity deludes Americans into ignoring the poverty crisis. Even worse, charity often acts as what Poppendieck calls a “moral safety valve,” alleviating any sense of personal responsibility for the suffering that surrounds us.

When a majority of Americans report that they donate or volunteer for charity, it is not just a symptom of a society where the poor are forced to scramble for donated goods. It is a cause of that suffering as well. “The growth of kindness and the decline in justice are intimately interrelated,” Poppendieck writes. “This massive charitable endeavor serves to relieve pressure for more fundamental solutions.”

Donating to a fundraiser for homeless people or participating in a “day of service” allows many Americans to avoid confronting the immorality of a society where great wealth exists alongside grinding poverty. Charity does not alleviate long-term poverty, but it is quite effective at alleviating American guilt about it.