What Charity?
Posted by Ezra Klein
This is why the Republican view towards giving doesn't work. It's not the fault of the ideology, but of the Republicans (and Democrats, etc):
The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports that Americans making $70,000 or more dispensed a paltry 3.3 percent of their earnings to charitable cuases; in contrast, those making $50,000 to $69,999 gave 5.6 percent, and those making $30,000 to $49,999 gave 8.9 percent. Only at death does the tightfistedness diminish—but even then it's the threat of the estate tax that awakens the philanthropic spirit. Or at least that's the conclusion of another new study, which predicts that deathbed donations will drop precipitously if the Bush Administration succeeds rolling back the estate tax. The study finds that the cost of such a repeal, in lost donations and bequests, could be as steep as $10 billion a year.
I'm all for taking charity out of the Government's hands, but the truth is that those thousand points of light simply don't burn very brightly. So when we couple the effects of Republicans in office (less generosity in Government programs plus recessions), the fact that the catered-to rich aren't giving much, and the fact that it is politically impossible to create the sort of structural reforms that will help eliminate poverty, you can see that the world is really quite screwed unless we take a bit more generous and humanistic approach to government.