That is an unusually generous percentage if it is looked at against more than three decades of best-books lists, but, as it happens, it is a duplicate of last year's percentage.
In Pictures: America's Most Generous Companies (Percentage of Profits Donated).
As Nicholas D. Kristof said, "Amazingly the working poor, who have the least resources, somehow manage to be more generous as a percentage of income than the middle class".
Or would it hurt charities by affecting the 50percentt of the donating public, the people who like me, itemize deductions, and do make sure every December that we gave enough to earn that deduction -- upping our giving in that last month to meet the standard -- the not so rich, but the generous who still constitute a substantial percentage of givers.
So, to determine which firms were most generous, we looked at 2002 cash giving as a percentage of 2001 operating income, essentially cash earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization.
America's Most Philanthropic Corporations 2002 We rank the ten most generous American companies, look at total cash-giving and at giving as a percentage of income.
As a percentage of our gross national income, America is only 19th most-generous in the developed world -- at 0.2percentt, we lag behind not only the British and Germans but Portugal, New Zealand and Austria as well.
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