Interesting article in the Sunday New York Times:  What Should a Billionaire Give – and What Should You?, by Peter Singer:

Now let’s look at the incomes of America’s rich and superrich, and ask how much they could reasonably give….

• [The Top 0.01% of U.S. taxpayers ($5 million+ annual gross income, excluding capital gains) should give 33% of their income
• Top 0.1% ($1.1-$5 million income) should give 25%
• Top 0.5% ($400k-$1.1 million income) should give 20%
• Top 1% ($276k-$400k income) should give 15%
• Top 10% ($92k-$276k income) should give 10%]

For more than 30 years, I’ve been reading, writing and teaching about the ethical issue posed by the juxtaposition, on our planet, of great abundance and life-threatening poverty. Yet it was not until, in preparing this article, I calculated how much America’s Top 10 percent of income earners actually make that I fully understood how easy it would be for the world’s rich to eliminate, or virtually eliminate, global poverty.