I'm still baffled by the logic of ordinary working people voting for politicians whose only policy seems to be to look after the rich.
Tea Partiers and the Spirit of Giving You guys really need to do something about that "charity gap". *<||;^{>
More worthlessness from you. The most recent year that a large, nonpartisan survey asked people about both redistributive beliefs and charitable giving was 1996. Get some data that is more recent than Haley Barbour watermelon jokes.
Wow Chris, seems that Mr. Brooks must have hit a little to close to home. Or perhaps my Santa smiley didn't come across *<||;^{> and I should have opted for standard wink.
Not at all. I don't engage in dick measuring contests about charity and volunteer work. I'm quite content with what I do and I don't need anyone to know about it. Merry Christmas.
And dick measuring contests are fundamentally flawed anyway b/c they always focus on length and rarely girth. Even more important, they never find a statistically satisfying way to quantify and measure small penis + "motion of the ocean". And yet again, we're faced w/ the dilemma of a failure to incorporate girth (or rather lack thereof) with the whole short dick equation. About the only thing we can all agree on is the song, "Don't want no short dick man."
Yet you take great offense when someone like Brooks points out that one of the disparaging stereotypes of Tea Partiers, one echoed here often, is a yet another fallacy that exists only in the mind of the left.
(Brooks) So what does all this tell us? Contrary to the liberal stereotype of the hard-hearted right-winger, opposition to income-leveling is not evidence that one does not care about others. Quite the contrary. The millions of Americans who believe in limited government give disproportionately to others. This is in addition to—not instead of—their defense of our free-enterprise system, which gives the most people the most opportunities to earn their own success. Or it can be interpreted that those who benefited the most from trickle-down economics the past 30 years - a lot of it government largesse in another form - gave more than those that were f*cked by trickle-down. Then again Brooks could be shading the truth altogether. I always thought that the wealthy might give more on a dollar basis, not as a percentage of income. I would be right, of course: In 2001, Independent Sector, a nonprofit organization focused on charitable giving, found that households earning less than $25,000 a year gave away an average of 4.2 percent of their incomes; those with earnings of more than $75,000 gave away 2.7 percent... ...His study, written with Michael W. Kraus and published online last month by The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, found that lower-income people were more generous, charitable, trusting and helpful to others than were those with more wealth. They were more attuned to the needs of others and more committed generally to the values of egalitarianism. “Upper class” people, on the other hand, clung to values that “prioritized their own need.” And, he told me this week, “wealth seems to buffer people from attending to the needs of others.” Empathy and compassion appeared to be the key ingredients in the greater generosity of those with lower incomes. And these two traits proved to be in increasingly short supply as people moved up the income spectrum. This compassion deficit — the inability to empathetically relate to others’ needs — is perhaps not so surprising in a society that for decades has seen the experiential gap between the well-off and the poor (and even the middle class) significantly widen. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/magazine/22FOB-wwln-t.html?_r=1
Chris, you are so funny. I had two quotes in my orginal post (remember the one that set you off?). One directly parroted Nancy Pelosi's remark in Brook's article. If you want more I suggest you review the original TP thread, there are plenty examples mocking the Tea Partiers as ignorant rubes who are blissfully unaware of real world sufferring.
Yeap, the poor are more generous than the rich, a fact Brooks points out is his worrk. And rural areas are more generous than big cities, the religious more generous than non-believers. Nothing you note is very surprising.
The two "quotes" in your original post in no way states an opinion that TP'ers are or are not generous with charity or volunteering. They don't even imply anything close to that topic. One is a political cartoon, but I wouldn't expect you to be able to grasp the meaning, so I'll cut you some slack on that one. The second suggests that there are people who unwittingly support politicians who's agenda is not consistent with their own. Big shock there. The article (and you) are totally off the mark in response to specific people in here. But you lost relevance long ago, so why waste the time on this. Believe what you want.
Liberals could constantly make hay out of the fact that the most conservative states are the biggest welfare recipients and have the highest divorce & murder rates. But that would be douchey and unproductive too.
This Brooks fella has been writing the same stuff since before the Tea Party exists. The process works like this. There is market demand for a study showing that wealthy people who don't want to pay taxes are abnormally generous with their money toward charities. Such a study would enable The WSJ and other parties that dislike taxes on the wealthy, to argue that it's effectively a wash, cut these people's taxes and they'll just give back to the poor otherwise. The author of such a study won't get paid much for the WSJ editorials, but there is loot to be plundered for selling the study itself to those who wish to spread the message, and by going on the speaking circuit. So, somebody like Mr. Brooks invents such a study. It doesn't seem much good to me. For starters, it doesn't address the big danged obvious point that the poorest people in the U.S. donate the most as a percentage of income. It also doesn't seem to control for enough factors. But that's OK. His study doesn't need to be correct. That is, it doesn't need to unveil the actual truth. It just needs to be credible. That's all that is required for those who already believe the message to grab the study and trumpet its findings. That's all that is required for PR about the findings to spread via the Internet headlines. Indeed, if you google "Republicans vs. Democrats charity" you will get a list of links stating that Republicans give more than Democrats to charity. Click on them, and every one leads back to Mr. Brooks. The man has invented an Internet reality. The market demands a polite fiction, supply arrives.
I’ll park this here for lack of a better spot and it is too good not to share. First a little background, a BigSoccer’s favorite Ezra Klein is taking flack for saying something really stupid… “the issue with the Constitution is the text is confusing because it was written over 100 years ago” and it has "no binding power on anything". So IowaHawk, one of the Internets greatest snarks has a little fun at the Washington Post wonk's expense and hilarity ensues: http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2010/12/the-constitution-is-very-important.html