These Billionaires Want Less Smoking
Bill Gates is one of the world’s greatest philanthropists - without him, there wouldn’t be the giant Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation - and now he wants people to stop a habit that the WHO predicts will kill a billion people in our century: smoking.
That’s right: both Gates and Michael Bloomberg are spending $500 million to stop people from smoking:
Bill Gates and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced on Wednesday that they would spend $500 million to stop people around the world from smoking.
…
This time, most are expected to be in poor countries like Bangladesh and middle-income countries like Russia. In an effort to cut that number, Mr. Bloomberg’s foundation plans to commit $250 million over four years on top of a $125 million gift he announced two years ago. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is allocating $125 million over five years.
Half a billion dollars? To stop people from the willing inhalation the smoke of tobacco?
Off the top of my head, here are some better suggestions of what they could do with their charity money:
- Feed the poor
- Fight AIDS
- Fund cancer research
- Teach poor children how to make money like Bill Gates did
- Pay people to go around giving free hugs to third-world citizens
- Start a $500 million contest for whoever finds a genius crop that feeds the world’s poor
- Buy poor kids with poor vision their own glasses
- Burn the money
Okay, that last one is kind of a stretch.
Billionaires are free to do what they want with their money, and in fact have done a lot of good in the world considering their vast amounts of leverage, but what would this program do, at best? “Wow, we’ve stopped them from smoking. But wow, I guess a lot of poor people still have AIDS, huh? We’ll do that next time.”
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