Decision ‘08

A Good Way To Pick A Fight

Recommend this to your liberal friends:

It’s tempting to say that Arthur Brooks, in his definitive new book on American charitable giving, has shown that there is nothing oxymoronic about the term “compassionate conservative.” That, at least, is the conclusion that critics have drawn from Brooks’s demonstration that conservatives, despite the myth that they lack compassion, give significantly more to charity than liberals do. But in fact Brooks has shown something even more significant: that “compassionate conservative” is not only overly defensive, but actually redundant. When it comes to charitable donations, volunteer activity, and even donating blood, it’s liberals, not conservatives, who should feel compelled to prove their compassion.

A Syracuse University professor who studied economics at the famously demanding Rand Graduate School, Brooks has exhaustively reviewed a wide range of nonpartisan survey research, much of it university-based, to demonstrate the existence of a charitable divide between liberals and conservatives. He has determined, for instance, that the average conservative-headed household gives 30 percent more money to charity than the average liberal-headed one ($1,600 compared with $1,227), despite earning 6 percent less annually. Moreover, Brooks has found that of the 25 states where charitable giving was above average, George W. Bush won 24 in the 2004 presidential race. Perhaps there really are, to borrow John Edwards’s glib phrase, two Americas: one charitable, the other miserly.

Ouch…let’s draw out one of those sentences for special consideration:

…[T]he average conservative-headed household gives 30 percent more money to charity than the average liberal-headed one ($1,600 compared with $1,227), despite earning 6 percent less annually.

There’s nothing I can add here that won’t be overly snarkly, so I merely let it stand…