Taxi ride this morning...

As usual, I took a taxi to work this morning. After boarding the taxi, the cabbie uncle started to tell me about the "big" news of the day... the CEO of NKF had a gold-plated tap in his toilet... from the reports in the papers.... and is drawing an annual pay of more than $500K...flying 1st class around the world.

He ws saying that poor people like him called to contribute to NKF because they would like to help the less fortunate. He is still working so he would like to help others but after learning that what we contribute is not for the patients... he said that he will not be calling in for contributions anymore. I too feel a little cheated. Imagine a person earning so much and it is a charitable organization that he is working in.

Ok, even if it is said that the more you earn, the more taxes you pay but it is rather ridiculous to me that a person is earning more than $500K a year running a charitable organization. The public is contributing to it every month, like me, deductions straight from my pay. Even though it is not a lot but imagine if every one in my company who uses Giro for their contribution every month, say an average of $10 per person, that will be about $2K per mth, $24K per year, and that is only from 1 company.

On top of that, there are the fund raising shows are that staged every year, a lot of people called in to donated even more money to help the kids and adults who are suffering from cancer. We have to pay GST on top of the donations that we donate. I don't think these are tax deductable as it is a call in donation but if it is for charity, why are the telcos charging us the GST. Can't they waive the GST? I can't remember how much is being charged for the call-ins but imagine we hit more than 900,000 calls, how much GST the telcos are collecting???

Come to think of it, for the coming NKF show on Thursday, I will not be calling in to donate. I'll just watch the show and see how many more people will donate. I am seriously thinking of cancelling my Giro deduction. Why are my donations being used to pay someone hundreds of thousands of dollars to run a charitable organization???