All hail Jeff Bezos the philanthropist! The rest of us will just keep paying our taxes | Marina Hyde

The Amazon founder says giving money away is really hard'. Luckily, poor people do far more of it than he does

How bracing to wake up yesterday and read that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos had donated $100m to Dolly Parton's charitable endeavours, at his own Courage and Civility" event. (Sarcastic airquotes: my own.) The many, many news reports about this act suggested it was a truly incredible sum from the second richest man in the world, who - according to recent estimates - gets richer by about $205m a day.

Anyway, once I'd peeled myself off the ceiling, I got busy on the government's tax calculator. If you're on the median average UK salary - and you pay your taxes - your take-home pay is 72 a day. Looked at one way, then, Jeff's benevolence would be the equivalent of donating 34.56 to charity. Have YOU ever donated thirty-four quid to charity? Do you pay your taxes? If so, you're actually being more generous than Jeff Bezos, who, famously, avoids almost all of his. And yet, where's YOUR splashy news write-up in all the fine news outlets of the world? Where's YOUR fawning TV interview? Why does no one refer to YOU as a philanthropist"?

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

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