[sokoloff]

It's likely less expensive on the government angle that you might think. Take a thought experiment where from your $100 donation, $90 goes to wages of highly-paid fund-raising or executive staff and only $10 goes to charitable "actual work". Suppose that your combined marginal tax rate is 40%.

If you instead kept that $100 to spend on yourself, you would give the government $40 and you could spend $60.

In the case you give it to charity, the development/executive staff pays income taxes on that $90, so if their marginal rate is the same as yours (assuming they're highly paid), they pay $36 in taxes, have $54 to spend, and $10 goes to programming. If it goes to staff paid under $147K, they pay their (lower) marginal rate on it, but the full 15.3% amount for Social Security and Medicare is paid on those funds.

It seems like the government is only out ~$4 ($40 less from you; $36 more from someone else), with ~$10 available for programs.

(The largest loss is that you lost $60 of spending power in exchange for only $10 in programming while development staff got an extra $54 of spending power. You lose way more than the government loses.)

[throw__away7391]

Meh, at the end of the day it is wasted effort. In my experience fund-raising staff were the most talented/educated people I worked with, they could be doing something better with their time and I could be doing something better with my money. You're right that the government is the biggest loser here, and by extension anyone who pays taxes or uses government services. The ability to write-off donations against taxes is a major distortion. There's a lot of fuzzy dealing, politics, and influence peddling going on with charities that I think we'd be better off as a society without.