>>Actually, they're just patching the system, fixing some of the symptoms here and there, while most of the time doing nothing substantial to fight the causes. But they feel good doing that.
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>Seems a little too cynical. In Victorian times they made a distinction between the 'deserving poor' (the widows and orphans and elderly and feeble) and the 'undeserving poor' ( the lazy, the dissolute, the drunken ) Charity isn't about fighting causes. Charity is about ameliorating suffering. But it is easier to be charitable toward the deserving poor.
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>Fighting the causes is another matter. That's investment in a better society. And investment must be done intelligently. That's not a good role for government because their spending other people's money. Throwing money at things doesn't automatically make it better. Inner city school systems are not underfunding so much as inner city school children are under-parented. Throwing money at a school system can't fix that, and throwing money at the parents with no requirements for behavior modification is what caused the breakdown of those families in the first place.

Throwing money is the way the system works, and as you said, it usually doesn't work. In Serbian, it usually qualifies as "cut your ears to patch your ass". The underlying causes are not behaviors or local schools running on vapors, not by themselves. It's that the people in question are left out of the system - they've lost their jobs, or never had them, or are bankrupt for any other reason. Their situation is reflected in their neighborhoods - they don't maintain their houses, their kids are neglected, the crime rate goes up, real estate prices go down, taxes collected go down, funding for local schools goes down, they can't find teachers who would work in the area... it's all connected.

One measure which would mean something (or "make a difference", as much I find the expression odd), would be to tax the businesses which closed their domestic operations and outsourced them as the net importers they are. They would need to lose the protection they have as domestic manufacturers, which they are not anymore. This would make production abroad not so lucrative, and would actually be opposite from throwing money - it would bring money. But it would also bring back many of the lost jobs. The cost is only to the corporations which outsourced the jobs in the first place, but then they had all the benefits because they promised to create jobs, and then cheated on the promise.

>And a lot of giving to charitable organizations isn't done by the rich - just people who don't always wait for "the government" to do it for them. I'm not a big fan of the charity industry, but that is not to say all charities fall into that category. In Cleveland the Cleveland Food Bank - one of my personal favorites - distributes about 95% of what it receives to people who really need food and is run primarily by volunteers. And the government has nothing to do with it.

I'd still rather see a society which has no need for charity, other than to help after a disaster - but then that wouldn't be charity, it would be solidarity. I help others today, so they'll be able to help someone else tomorrow.