Social Experiment? by Gerri Brousseau

While driving to my day job yesterday I heard a story on the radio about a guy who put up a request on one of those cyber sites where you ask for donations. I’m not against this at all. In fact we posted a lot to help our friend, Leia Shaw, raise money to get a service dog for her son, Teo. I think these things can be quite helpful and a total success, but the story on the radio left me wondering.

Apparently some guy put up a request saying he wanted to raise $10.00 to make potato salad and would invite the person(s) making the donation to come help him eat it. Silly, I know. But the real joke was that this guy (as of yesterday) had raised . . . are you ready . . . $22,000.00! Could it possibly be that easy? Then I started to wonder about the tax implications. Would a person file this as income with the IRS? Would the IRS even know about it? (Of course because the IRS knows about everything, don’t they?) I also couldn’t help but wonder if this was done as a social experiment or just for kicks, and most importantly I wonder if this is legal.

 Clearly there are some worthy causes out there, such as Teo’s service dog, and people putting up requests for friends who may have lost everything in a fire or someone needing a medical procedure, but the idea of making $22,000.00 on a request to make potato salad leaves me with a lot of questions; such as I wonder how much money I could make if I post a request for $15.00 to make lemonade.

What are your thoughts?

Filed under: romance