here are some of the reasons you or some grade-A asshole you know will give for not helping other people

That charity's CEO makes too much

Give me a fucking break.

First of all, CEO compensation is not nearly as important as a charity's efficiency, as measured by, for instance, Charity Navigator. CEOs of very large charities may make amounts that sound large, but relative to the amount of money the charity takes in and redistributes, a seemingly large number doesn't necessarily mean anything.

Second of all ... look, all you're doing here is making it clear how little attention you pay to how much OTHER CEOs make, the ones who don't work for charities. The charity CEOs sure as fuck aren't making an amount the private sector would find significant. They're making more than you are, and more than I am. A lot more. But if you're outraged by that, I think it can only be because of a lack of perspective, a lack of understanding the real scale of income in the world. There may be a handful of charity executives who are overcompensated -- I certainly can't claim to have seen everyone's tax forms -- but far more common are the executives making much less than their private sector counterparts.

According to CharityWatch, the highest paid charity CEO (who makes twice as much as the second-highest) makes about $3.5 million. Sure, it sounds like a lot. The average income of a CEO of an S&P 500 company is almost $14 million. The median income of charity CEOs is about 1.1% of that. PLEASE PAY ATTENTION TO THAT DECIMAL POINT, YOU SHITHEAD.

You pay charity CEOs more than other workers for the same reason you pay other CEOs more than other workers -- because our culture expects and encourages salaries to work that way, and because you are competing for their labor with other organizations that could offer them more. Any legitimate problem you can raise with that is best addressed to the private sector, where the inequality is far greater, and where much, much more of the money from your wallet ends up in the offshore accounts of CEOs.

Third, thinking of CEO compensation purely in terms of income misunderstands a great deal about the world of the American wealthy, and charity CEOs aren't receiving the tremendous benefits of their private sector counterparts. Even that 1.1% figure is overselling the wealth of the heads of charities.

Fourth, what is it you're actually outraged about, when you come down to it?

Is it really the amount of money? You're really not contributing much to it, let's face it. The only charity CEOs making serious money are heading charities large enough that your donations are a drop in the bucket -- you may as well complain about the contribution of your sales tax to the salaries of the state government officials you don't like, if you're going to fixate on the unfair distribution of your every dime.

I think this complaint more frequently speaks to a conviction people have that people who work for charities should do so primarily out of a motivation to be charitable, and that there is therefore something inappropriate about them being paid for it. We are so fucking miserly in our approach to charity, our approach to helping others, that even when we're in essence hiring a service to do good works on our behalf, we don't want that service to retain any of the money we're giving them to do so. We want it to pass untouched directly to the recipients. We want our charities to be volunteer-run and incur no expenses beyond a postage stamp, while somehow managing to distribute our charity in more useful and efficient forms than we can do ourselves.

That doesn't say great things about you or the grade-A asshole you know.

Goodwill doesn't work the way I thought it did

Well Jesus Christ, tough shit, buttercup.

Goodwill does not redistribute donated goods to the poor.

Goodwill provides charitable services in the form of employment, training, and related community programs to its employees, and collects donated goods in order to keep its overhead costs low so that it can afford to fund those services and pay those incomes.

That has always been Goodwill's model, and they've been around for over a century.

If you don't think that's a model you want to fund, don't do business with Goodwill. But the number of people who think Goodwill is deceiving them and collecting donated goods under false pretenses is ridiculous. It isn't their fault that you don't pay attention to one of the best-known charities in the country.

Charities don't even do charity, man, they just keep all the money

cf. the CEO argument above.

There are some bad charities. There are a few different kinds, I guess: actual scams, de facto scams that nevertheless legally operate as charities, charities that are run incompetently, charities that are run incredibly inefficiently, and charities that allow political or religious motivations to impact the way they operate, without sufficiently disclosing that to donors.

But first of all: this is not the majority of charities.

Second: You are not a fucking nineteenth century street urchin with nothing to rely on but the life skills you earned at the School of Hard Knocks. You have the internet. You have Charity Navigator. You have the ability to Google for NYT articles about a given charity. It is not fucking difficult to figure out if a given charity is a) real, b) the subject of a recent or ongoing legitimate scandal that should give you pause, c) good at doing whatever it is you want to accomplish with your charitable donation. This takes five minutes at the most.

Third: Apart from the scams, most of those problems are not about "keeping all the money," they're organizational problems or problems of the charity's goals not matching your own. People jump to this idea of charities being secret profit monsters really quickly, because -- well, because they're assholes without much real compassion, and a lot of these arguments, you'll notice, have a foul core at the center of the onion that is all about who does and doesn't deserve your compassion.

Drug-test welfare recipients

There are so many reasons this is a horseshit idea, and only a horseshit person would support it:

1: Assuming your goal is to save money by denying assistance to those who test positive, it doesn't work: these programs consistently cost more money than they save.

This fight has already been played out in decades of workplace drug-testing, which has declined since its 1990s peak not because drug use has declined but because employers discovered that spending money on drug testing employees or applicants was not actually resulting in gains of productivity. Outside of safety-relevant contexts, the purpose of drug testing is not really to improve performance or save money, it's to ostracize drug users.

2: The whole premise is wrongly predicated. Welfare recipients are significantly less likely to use drugs than the general population.

There is a common image of the average drug user as a strung-out addict living on the streets, an image promoted by both Nixon's War on Drugs and, especially, Reagan's campaign against crack, but one that Democrats have bought into just as much. It's not true, of course. It's insane that I have to point out that it isn't true. You are in all likelihood a current or past drug user yourself.

Drugs cost money. People with more money are more likely to be able to afford drugs. It's not fucking rocket science, and it's not a secret. Study after study -- and the War on Drugs has motivated many such studies -- of illegal drug use has confirmed this for decades. Lower-income people just don't have the money to spare to buy drugs as often or in as great numbers as the rest of the population does. What is true, however, is that when they buy drugs they are more likely to buy them in public or semi-public places rather than from a classmate or co-worker like the more monied people who don't think of themselves as drug users, and they are more likely to be targeted and intercepted.

Every level of the War on Drugs already disproportionately impacts lower-income drug users (and accused drug users and their families): drug investigations, searches, drug arrests, drug convictions, asset forfeiture and civil forfeiture, parole denials, readmissions to prison for parole violations. Felony conviction -- and some misdemeanor convictions in some jurisdictions -- results in significant loss of rights, which can include the right to vote, to serve on juries, and to receive welfare or other public assistance. It seriously impacts job prospects in most states, and can disqualify applicants from college scholarships. And obviously felony conviction for drug offenses, once again, disproportionately impacts people of lower income.

So you're already accomplishing your goal: denying benefits to people who are both needy and drug users.

3: But why do you have that goal?

Because you are a suckhole piece of shit, is why.

Because the core premise of laws like this is that aid goes to "the deserving," and we have demonized drug use, but we have demonized it in a very specific way. Drug use is prevalent throughout all ranks of society, after all. We have primarily demonized it among people who are vulnerable to being caught doing it.

We don't propose drug testing kids applying for student loans, the CEOs of companies receiving corporate welfare, etc etc. We single out the small percentage of the population receiving a specific form of aid that has been subject to decades of demonization, because ultimately this argument is just about looking for an excuse to deny welfare benefits to people, because you don't think anyone deserves them.

Why should we spend money on foreign aid when we have homeless veterans right here

Porque no los dos, you fuckknuckle?

This "why help this cause when this other cause exists" argument is obviously one of the lowest forms of conversation, but I know you know some grade-A asshole who brings it up.

Why should we have welfare, just work hard

However hard you work, there are hundreds of thousands of people who work harder and have less to show for it.

However hard you work, luck is always a factor. I'm not even just talking about privilege here. Privilege is important: regardless of effort and personal achievement, the system benefits white people, benefits native English speakers, benefits men, benefits people who could afford a college education regardless of whether they truly needed the content of that education for their job. But I'm talking about luck. If you don't understand that luck has played a role in your every success, you have badly misread the story of your life. If you don't understand that it could have easily gone another way if the person who interviewed you for a job just happened to be in a worse mood that day, or if your parents had moved to Town X instead of Town Y, then you understand almost nothing about your own life, and you certainly don't understand anything about the circumstances anyone else faces.

You can work hard and have nothing to show for it. You can work hard and prosper. The problem comes when those who work and prosper assume that their prosperity is evidence of their character, and that by extension everyone else's successes or lack thereof reflects their own worth.

Very few people these days will come out and say "the tangible rewards you have in life reflect who you are as a person and your value" (though of course some close, like the people who subscribe to abominable, morally toxic doctrines that correlate "positive or negative thinking" to the positive or negative events in your life). But you only have to talk to a few people in the course of any day to realize that it's what many of them believe.

And they are grade-A assholes.

People deserve welfare because they're people.

People deserve compassion because they're people.

Except for maybe your grade-A asshole friend over there.

But I don't really ...

No, I know you don't. Listen. This is the problem. This is what so much of this horseshit comes down to, and you or your grade-A asshole friend ought to shut the fuck up unless you want people to realize this about you: it comes down to a desire to withhold compassion.

A desire to use it as a reward. To give it -- whether "it" means caring about what happens to people, acting on that caring, or supporting policies and organizations that distribute material assistance and services to people -- only to "the deserving."

This desire to withhold compassion, to withhold charity, consistently overrides even pragmatic thinking: nevermind that it costs more to drug-test welfare recipients than you could ever save by doing so, as long as one drug user is denied some food stamps, it's all worth it, right? Nevermind that drug treatment programs are proven, again and again, to cost less and prevent more crime than prison sentences for drug users. Why should we help someone who doesn't deserve it, even if it benefits us to do so? Nevermind that it helps the economy to fund housing, education, healthcare, and job training for anyone who needs it -- what really matters here is, do we think they deserve the help?

If we try hard enough, I'm pretty sure we can always find a way to no. We are a pretty innovative fucking people, after all.