Faith, Hope, and Charity

...Brooks, who teaches public administration at Syracuse, brings several formidable skills to his task...

...Leftists, by contrast, believe they're the people in America who are the most compassionate...

...But Brooks shows that the beliefs held by the most generous Americans are far more likely to be held by the right than by the left...

...These beliefs, he contends, aren't just limited to the right...

...Once Brooks has demolished the notion that conservatives are wealth-hoarding misers who hate poor people, he gets on to the second purpose of his book—getting everyone to give more...

...Rather, this is a book about what current social science tells us about who gives to charities and why people give...

...Anyone interested in American charities will learn a great deal from Arthur C. Brooks's important book...

...Some deregulation would also help...

...Another interesting point of Brooks's research concerns support for government income redistribution with charitable giving...

...For example, in 2004, the billionaire mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, cut government funding to 800 nonprofits in that city, and supplanted the government funds with $140 million in donations from his personal fortune...

...Readers should also be aware that Brooks's argument about conservatives Who Really Cares The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism: America's Charity Divide— Who Gives, Who Doesn't, and Why it Matters by Arthur C. Brooks Basic Books, 256 pp., $26 being more charitable comes with one important caveat...

...Brooks sees "four forces in American life that are primarily responsible for making Americans charitable...

...Under today's welfare laws, states set the payments under Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), the principal government welfare program...

...But Brooks uses the anecdote to show how well-meaning bureaucrats issue regulations that discourage voluntarism...

...Brooks shows the unsung heroes of philanthropy are the janitors and clerks who tithe to their church or volunteer at their schools or local homeless shelters...

...Brooks cites an interesting but neglected paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in 2005 in which economists Jonathan Gruber and Daniel M. Hungerman explored this "crowding-out effect" on charities during the New Deal...

...He's expert at sorting through dense, well-established social surveys and discovering what research within them is worth writing about...

...The more religious you are, the more likely you are to give to charity...

...It seems ridiculously obvious that the government should not suppress charity through bureaucratic rules and procedures," Brooks writes...

...One way to do that, he argues, is for the left to quit picking on rich people who make big donations...

...Most of us, after all, don't read the University of Michigan's Panel Study of Income Dynamics or the University of Chicago's General Social Survey for fun...

...They call this process the "public goods crowding-out effect...

...Tennessee's TANF payments are 61 percent lower than New Hampshire's, but Tennesseans give, on average, 4.3 percent of their incomes, well above the 1.8 percent in New Hampshire...

...will rally their fellow Democrats this year by railing against the Republicans as misers who want to make the rich richer and the poor more miserable...

...It's perfectably understandable that many potential volunteers might well find other things to do when faced with this state-mandated training session...

...Faith, Hope, and Charity Who gives to whom, and why by Martin Morse Wooster Ever since the New Deal, a well-worn piece of equipment in the liberal tool kit of debating points is the notion that liberals are more compassionate than conservatives because they want to raise taxes on the rich in the name of helping the poor...

...Although Brooks has some thoughtful suggestions about how government can increase giving, he really isn't that concerned about federal policy...

...The New Jersey Office of Recreation mandates that every volunteer attend a three-hour orientation session "that addresses the perspective of the specific population(s) involved (for example, young, senior, novice, and skilled athletes...

...A 2004 survey conducted by Syracuse University, for example, found that if you took two people who were identical in age, income, education, gender, religion, race, and political views, but whose only disagreement was that one person thought it was the government's job to redistribute income from the rich to the poor while the other thought that income redistribution was none of the state's business, the person who opposed government income redistribution was likely to contribute $267 more to charity each year than the income redistribution advocate...

...How accurate are these arguments...

...Brooks calculates that if Tennessee raised its welfare payments to New Hampshire's level, charitable giving in Tennessee would fall by 42 percent...

...Are liberals more compassionate than conservatives...

...Europe's fading churches, by the way, are one reason Europeans are far less likely to give and to volunteer than Americans are...

...Yet this occurs with depressing regularity...

...Instead of aiding the less fortunate, the left says, right-wingers wallow in wealth...

...There are plenty of churchgoing liberals with strong marriages who are big givers to charity...

...This is a thoughtful look at why Americans give and what can be done to encourage giving...

...Of course, you don't have to be named Gates, Buffett, or Bloomberg to give...

...This finding, Brooks reports, occurs even though residents of the deep-blue pro-Kerry states, on average, earned 38 percent more per household than their red-state counterparts...

...The truth," Brooks writes, "is that conservatives only tend to be more religious and charitable than liberals...

...All the evidence, he argues, suggests that conservatives are more generous than liberals...

...Here government can provide some help...

...Bloomberg's personal wealth has made him a modern-day Medici," wrote Times reporters Sam Roberts and Jim Rutenberg, "a role that, some critics say, can also stifle dissent from institutions that have quietly absorbed city budget cuts because they worry that what the mayor gives he can also stop giving...

...Brooks finds a similar crowding-out process taking place today...

...The New York Times, of course, thought that Bloomberg gave for cynical reasons...

...New Jersey law requires that any organization providing such a training program "shall issue a certificate of participation to each participant" who completes the course...

...Despite the subtitle, Who Really Cares is not a book about "compassionate conservatism," if you define this term to be the Bush administration's policies towards aiding faith-based charities...

...Allowing everyone to deduct charitable donations from their income taxes (instead of the current practice of only allowing those who itemize to deduct) would do a great deal of good...

...We need interpreters, and Brooks is very good at interpreting the available evidence...

...They're so concerned about the poor that they want to raise taxes on the rich to strengthen the safety net...

...The five states that gave more than 60 percent of their votes to President Bush in 2004 are ones whose residents give 3.5 percent of their incomes to charity, nearly twice as much per person as residents of the five states (including the District of Columbia) where John Kerry got 60 percent or better...

...But it's an easy prediction to say that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi Martin Morse Wooster, a senior fellow at the Capital Research Center and contributing editor to Philanthropy, is most recently the author of Great Philanthropic Mistakes...

...They found that while the welfare state between 1933 and 1939 expanded from zero to four percent of the gross domestic product, religious charities shrunk by 30 percent during the same period...

...These liberal shibboleths have been somewhat weakened by the welfare reform legislation of 1996...

...Twenty-four of the 25 most generous states were red ones (only Maryland was a charitably minded blue state...

...There is a strong correlation between religious faith and charity...

...These forces are religion, skepticism about the role of government in economic life, strong families, and personal entrepreneurism...

...The answer, says Arthur C. Brooks in this thoughtful and engaging book, is no...

...The really rich, Brooks shows, give proportionately more of their incomes, but the working poor are also surprisingly generous givers...

...Conservatives, the liberals insist, are skinflints...

...For example, suppose you live in New Jersey and want to coach your son's Little League team...

...One of them is that the redder the state is, the more likely its residents are to be charitable...

...This tendency towards conservatives being more generous produces some striking findings...

...In other words," Brooks writes, "people in favor of forced income redistribution are privately less charitable than those who oppose it, regardless of how much money they earn...

...Economists, of course, have long known that if the state expands, the private sector shrinks...

...They're Scrooges and Social Darwinists who cheer on the fat cats while kicking away the bottom rungs of the social ladder so that poor people never have a chance to advance...

...But wouldn't it be more productive for reporters to honor Mayor Bloomberg for his generosity—and write more positive stories about large donors, particularly those who use their wealth to fund innovative ways to help the poor and struggling...