The Red Cross is not equipped to make effective use of all that money at once

Says who? They can (ethically) invest it and fund programs off a 5%-8% or better return. They can find new things to do. They can donate some of it into health research that is currently under-funded.

> They can (ethically) invest it and fund programs off a 5%-8% or better return

They can also lose or squander it. One of the Gates Foundation’s value adds is monitoring.

And with such a sum of money they would surely have to hire staff to work all that out. Can thy do that?

I’ve tried volunteering at certain orgs before, I filled out forms and literally they rejected me because they had no more staff to organise and oversee more volunteers.

If your solution is just invest it, well, the Gates Foundation may as well hang on to it (you think you can do better job than Buffet?) and setup a system to dole it out.

If the org has to find new uses for it, surely the Gates Foundation is in a better position to get that done?

These are things that the Gates Foundation does currently and the Red Cross does not (at the scale of the Gates Foundation).

I'd be more willing to give this idea credit, if the total annual budget for the ICRC ($2B) and Doctors Without Borders ($1.6B) was more than a few percent of the total amount being proposed (>$100B invested or ~$8B/yr for 20 years).

You'd require those organizations to more than double in size to use the funding provided. That's not a good plan. Bluntly, his plan is better than yours.

I've got no love for Gates, but are you just trying to draw attention to yourself? What's your agenda? You're the one making a fairly outrageous unsupported claims.

I don't think you understand really how thngs work if you believe, giving something like the Red Cross Billions would just work.

Just googling it delivers enough critisism on worst level than you think Bill Gates Foundation is: "misusing funds, poor logistical planning, inadequate responses to specific crises, and even allegations of fraud and theft. "

Impact matters. Impact doesn't mean to just give money to some organization. Bill Gates actually played a significant role in Ebola vacination. Why? Because he/his team revisted why just giving out vacines was not enough.

Impact means helping as efficient as possible with the money.

And btw. a lot of other charities of this style (especially christians ones we all know) have also borderline ways of missusing believers to do their work. My aunt worked for nuns and got paid shit. This is now a problem for her retirment. Guess who pays that? Yeah the state...

That much wealth could probably fund every food bank in the country indefinitely, even at extremely conservative returns.

> That much wealth could probably fund every food bank in the country indefinitely

That seems like an incredibly stupid way to spend money that has been eradicating diseases and saving lives in countries where food insecurity isn’t a choice.

Food insecurity is a choice in the US? I suppose yes, if you mean it's the government's choice: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/food-banks-usda-cuts-im...

> Food insecurity is a choice in the US? I suppose yes, if you mean it's the government's choice

That’s what I mean. Like the housing shortage, food insecurity is trivially solved if voters cared about it. We don’t at almost every political level.

Do food banks lack funding? In my region they often struggle to give away food before throwing it out. Even the poor in America don’t starve.