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juliawise comments on The Atheist's Tithe - Less Wrong
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I'll just point out that 50% is not a majority.
Have you guys ever been tempted to make it 50.1% so you can say it's a majority? ;) Or do you think it's better not to seem too extreme?
We try to go a little over 50% in case our income is slightly different than we expected (working more hours in late December or something).
50% seems like a nice clean number, and giving 50.1% so we can say "most" seems likely to alternate people because it's picky, technical, and possibly intended to mislead.
(Now, as of this year our goal is to donate half of our tax reported income, but it's really hard to figure our what your final income numbers will be until you receive all your 1099s and full out taxes. So we'll probably aim slightly high and it may end up being a literal majority regardless.)
That makes sense - my 50.1% suggestion was tongue in cheek, and giving something like 55% (or a majority due to difficulty of working out income, as you describe) would make more sense. My question would then be whether you think you should say you give "half" or "a majority", given that it sounds like you'll be able to reasonably say either.
My(admittedly brief) Googling mentioned all of your income and roughly 2/3 of his being donated. I'll edit for accuracy.
Link? If someone's passing on inflated numbers we'd like to see if we can sort things out with them.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/jsx/proportional_giving/anqn
Upon looking back at it, I clearly misread you - there's a pretty big difference between donating 30-33% and keeping 30-33%. Apologies.
(Also, while I suspect you've probably considered this, is that the most tax-efficient way of donating? I can't speak to American tax law, but up here in Canada, one person donating all their income is a waste of possible tax credits, and the goal should be to bring both partners down to a similar post-donations income to minimize tax payable)
Julia and I file as "married filing jointly" which means from the government's perspective we're one financial unit that earned some money and donated some money. With my 30% (pre tax) and Julia's 100% (post tax), last year came to 40.5% overall (pre tax).
Talking about having separate numbers for the two of us does tend to confuse people, though, so we've switched to both of using giving 50% (pre tax).