Who Really Cares?

Disclaimer: I'm not saying that all liberals are ungenerous, many of them are more generous than I am. I'm just looking at the statistics and reporting. Don't shoot the messenger.

Further disclosure: One mitigating factor in the disparity between "liberals" and "conservatives" giving is that "liberals" normally live in areas where cost of living is higher (urban areas) than in more rural areas where people are more conservative. However, I don't think this makes up for the 30% difference.

A lot of people think that liberals are more caring, and more concerned with the poor and the welfare of society than conservatives. As I have said before, it simply is not true. Conservatives are MORE concerned about the betterment of society than liberals, at least, our checkbooks, our time, and our blood says so. This study was between principled conservatives and principled liberals. It compared the 30% of society that calls themselves liberal, versus the 40% of society that calls themselves conservative. The 30% of society that calls themselves "centrist" or "moderate" was excluded from this study. Conservative families give 30% more to charities, and lest you think the conservative families have higher incomes, they didn't in this study, the liberal families made 6% more income, yet gave 30% less to charity. In addition, the conservative group were 51% more likely to volunteer and conservative volunteers spent 12% more hours volunteering than liberals in any given year. If liberals and moderates gave as much blood as conservatives we would increase our blood supply by 45% (meaning that conservatives give about twice as much blood as liberals.)

In addition to conservatives being more generous, the things that they do to help the poor are more effective, and more personal than what liberals do for the poor and downtrodden. The bottom line is the "common knowledge" that liberals care more about the poor and downtrodden than conservatives is a myth.

I got these statistics from Arthur C. Brooks' book "Who Really Cares?" You can find it on Google books for free here. If you don't want to wade through the book read this article.

Republican Tax Policies

If you aren't yet convinced that Republicans have better tax policies than Democrats I dare you to read these two posts.

Here, and here.