It’s common to receive a charity promotion that says “Donate now because someone has offered a matching gift.” For every dollar you send, they’ll send a dollar. It apparently gets people giving more. People like to see their money multiplied that way. Such a donation magnifies what you give, often by 100%, depending on the terms of the match.

People like the tax deduction for charities, too. It also offers what you can think of as a matching gift. Let’s suppose, just for illustration, that you pay that you pay 20% tax on the high end of your income, the so-called “marginal rate” at which new dollars of income are taxed if you make more money. Deductions are taken off the top, so every dollar you deduct means you don’t get taxed 20% on that dollar. So if you give a dollar, you pay $0.20 back on your taxes. It’s like you gave only 80% because you got 20% back. That means it’s like a 25% matching gift—$20 from the government for every $80 you spend means the government gives one dollar every time you give four. A lot of people are motivated by that.

So what if I told you that you could get a 1000% match on your gift? That is, for every dollar you give, $11 would be given to your charity. No tax deduction on this charity, but who cares? This is way better than the 25% match that you get from taxes. How would I manage this amazing feat?

Well, first, let me tell you who this deserving charity is: companies with products Made in America. OK, it’s not even an official charity, certainly nothing you can deduct on your taxes. And it’s not even just one company. But is it deserving your support? You bet. They’re working hard for those dollars.

“How does it work?” I hear some of you asking. “Does it require filling out a lot of forms?” Nope. No forms. The donation is instantaneously managed. You just buy something and all the paperwork takes care of itself. You just buy American.

“But I’m not rich. I can’t always afford to buy American. The ‘other brand’ is often cheaper, and I need to make every dollar count. The advertisements on TV tell me that they’ll always undersell the competition.” That’s right. But by how much? Let’s look at the difference. Suppose you can buy an American-made item but it costs a little more. Let’s say it costs $1.10 but the foreign item costs $1.00. You’d probably say you were just throwing away that extra dime, right? Not at all. The effect of that one thin dime could be way more powerful than you imagine. It’s hard to find a more powerful way to kickstart the economy, and it’s something you can personally do.

Let’s suppose you choose to think of that dime as a charity. It’s money you think you’re just giving away, that you didn’t have to. You can’t write it off on your taxes—it’s not that kind of charity. But it’s money you didn’t have to spend. What would happen if you did this? Well, it gets magnified by what amounts to a matching gift, or you can think of it that way. So you buy something at $1.10 and you think of it as paying the $1.00 you’d wanted to spend and $0.10 to charity. But the company sees the full $1.10 as income. That’s $1.10 that went to your chosen charity, American industry. That’s a multiplier of 11x. $0.10 from you and $1.00 from a matching contribution, which supplied for free by the marketplace. A 1000% match, or $10 on every $1 that you put in as your “charity contribution.”

If you have to pay $1.50 rather than $1.00, it might seem like the fifty cents is just being given away. But $1.50 goes to American industry. So from the $1.50 you pay, $0.50 is your share of the “charity” contribution but $1.50 gets sent to the deserving recipient. That’s a 200% match. Even if you have to pay $2.00 rather than $1.00, you’re still getting a 100% match on your money. (I’ll save you the trouble of computing it: It has to get to $5 for American goods instead of $1 for foreign goods before you’re getting “only” the 25% match that you got on a tax deduction, where the government contributed $1 for every $4 you contributed.)

Please note, too, that these people you’re sending to by buying American are not just people with their hands out on a street corner. Such people may need help, too, but often that they need is jobs, not cash handouts. American industry isn’t just standing around idly. They’re working hard day in and day out to make quality products that you’d like to buy. They just can’t always hit the price point that foreign countries can. Many foreign countries get that price point either because they manipulate currency or because they don’t pay for a living wage or because they don’t pay for important benefits like health care and retirement. We in the US can either compete with those countries by insisting that our country lower its prices (and its employment standards) until we match up with them, or by insisting that we’ll pay for higher priced products here because we know we’re investing in a living standard that we want the whole world to match. If we say that getting the absolute lowest price is always the most important thing, we are saying that those other things—decent wages, health care, etc.—don’t matter.

Mostly we’re talking about stuff we have to buy anyway. So when there’s a choice, why not send your hard-earned money to companies that make things in America? Those companies can then succeed and even expand, hiring new employees, which may help those people on the street corner even more than a handout would anyway.

And don’t forget the money you pay will be taxed as income by companies you’re buying from, which means the US government will see revenue that can pay for teachers, fire fighters, policeman, public infrastructure like roads and bridges, social security, and health care—even as we also pay down the national debt. The better our national revenues, the less pain all around for everyone as we work through a balanced approach to resolving our economic issues.

Buying American-made products is a real win-win-win-win... And it starts with the simple act of knowing what you really want to invest in, and putting your money where you really want that money to go—a prosperous American economy.

Now how much would you pay?