NY Times: Liberals Are Stingy

The only surprise in this piece is that it was written by a liberal NY Times columnist:

This holiday season is a time to examine who’s been naughty and who’s been nice, but I’m unhappy with my findings. The problem is this: We liberals are personally stingy.

Liberals show tremendous compassion in pushing for generous government spending to help the neediest people at home and abroad. Yet when it comes to individual contributions to charitable causes, liberals are cheapskates.

Arthur Brooks, the author of a book on donors to charity, “Who Really Cares,” cites data that households headed by conservatives give 30 percent more to charity than households headed by liberals. A study by Google found an even greater disproportion: average annual contributions reported by conservatives were almost double those of liberals.

Other research has reached similar conclusions. The “generosity index” from the Catalogue for Philanthropy typically finds that red states are the most likely to give to nonprofits, while Northeastern states are least likely to do so.

The upshot is that Democrats, who speak passionately about the hungry and homeless, personally fork over less money to charity than Republicans — the ones who try to cut health insurance for children.

“When I started doing research on charity,” Mr. Brooks wrote, “I expected to find that political liberals — who, I believed, genuinely cared more about others than conservatives did — would turn out to be the most privately charitable people. So when my early findings led me to the opposite conclusion, I assumed I had made some sort of technical error. I re-ran analyses. I got new data. Nothing worked. In the end, I had no option but to change my views.”

The thing is there are a whole variety of lefty fables that can be easily disproved (such as higher taxes will improve the economy), but so far this is the only one that has actually inspired a lefty to change his opinion. It is a momentous point in history.

We know that liberals are in fact generous - with other people's money. They're just not generous with their own unless they're pouring it into a campaign for a liberal candidate. They're more than willing to buy TV ads or mailers for a candidate. They're just not inspired by the thought of buying food or shelter for the truly needy.

And since most of them don't belong to a church, the concept of tithing is completely foreign to them. If they do attend a church they're more likely to tip God than tithe. And of course, church attendance for them is probably more for political expediency than actual faith (see Obama, Barack and the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago).

Joe Biden's charitable giving was absolutely embarrassing, but he can be content that he's not alone among liberal skinflints.