The 158 families pouring half the money into the 2016 election

"I'm never going to be poor, so I see no reason anyone else should be."

So let's say you are either rich, or well off enough that you know you'll never have the worries of poor people, such as hunger, or lack of shelter, or saving enough for emergencies. And since you have that status, you don't think anyone else should be poor.

First, you would have no clue what that poor person has to go through on a daily basis, yet you feel you can judge that person. Second, there are plenty of reasons why people are poor, and they don't necessarily have to do with the stereotypes of laziness or bad decisions. Some people just don't have the physical, mental abilities or both to gain skills to make them successful. Not to mention, there are plenty of people who do everything the right way, yet, due to circumstances beyond their control, such as an illness, injuries from an accident, a natural disaster, or a job loss, find themselves poor.

 

The sad truth is, big-time political donations typically pay for themselves many times over.

 

When you show me pictures of this being a table in the Clinton mansion or the Heinz-Kerry mansion or the Soros mansion, I'll start listening. Studies have consistently shown that conservatives are much more generous with THEIR OWN money than liberals.

 

Why are you politicizing this? One size fits all, you know.

 

So you're a Gannett executive?

 

That was a pretty weak effort. Even for you.

 

Sorry. Finding humor when speaking of Gannett is extremely difficult. I'm sure we can both agree on this.

 

regress charitable_giving i.party_id##i.religion, robust

 

Riptide is SJ's new Chief People Officer.

 

Everyone will be given a fair chance to reapply for their board names.

 

Inaccurate.

The received wisdom, at least in the media, is that conservatives are more giving. The prevalence of this view may result from its irresistibly counterintuitive flavor -- you know, how curious that conservatives are against spending on social programs and liberals say they care about the poor, but conservatives are generous in their private lives and liberals are skinflints. Conservative pundits like George F. Will ran with this ball because, as he put it, the mismatch "subverts a stereotype." (One that makes his conservative readers look bad, it might be added.)

The source of the notion that conservatives are more generous is the 2006 book "Who Really Cares," by Arthur C. Brooks, who later became president of the pro-business American Enterprise Institute.

The book was a brief for "compassionate conservatism," but its claim raised a lot of skepticism, and not only among liberals. One problem noted across the political spectrum was Brooks' reliance on the 2000 Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey to distinguish "liberal" from "conservative." The problem was that the survey didn't seem to accurately measure those categories and didn't distinguish well between social conservatives or liberals and fiscal conservatives or liberals.

What the MIT researchers did find, however, was that conservatives give more to religious organizations, such as their own churches, and liberals more to secular recipients. Conservatives may give more overall, MIT says, but that's because they tend to be richer, so they have more money to give and get a larger tax benefit from giving it. (One of the things that makes social scientists skeptical of the benchmark survey Brooks used, in fact, is that it somehow concluded that liberals are richer than conservatives.)

The degree of religious contribution is important, because a 2007 study by Indiana University found that only 10% to 25% of church donations end up being spent on social welfare purposes, of which assistance to the poor is only a subset. In other words, if you think of "giving" as "giving to the poor," a lot of the money donated by conservatives may be missing the target. ​