Barticles quotes Jeff Jacoby’s piece titled “The Stingy Liberal.” The gist of the piece is that data shows suggests that the metropolitan areas where the median families give away the largest percentage of their income tend to be in very conservative places.
I wouldn’t respond—except that Jacoby calls out my hometown of Springfield, Massachusetts as one of the “stingiest” cities by name. But since I’ve got to stand up for the home team, let’s look under the hood of Jacoby’s numbers:
First, the data is compiled from IRS charitable deduction data. These numbers include donations given to churches but not donations given to any cause or person that is not tax deductible. If I give $500 to my church to air condition the sanctuary, it’s counted. If I give $500 to an uninsured neighbor to help cover medical costs, it isn’t counted, even though this is pretty clearly a more charitable act than buying myself Sunday morning air conditioning. And if I don’t itemize my deductions (or make more than $50,000 a year), any giving I do gets excluded from the study entirely.
So we would expect charitable giving to be higher in areas where church membership is high for people making over $50,000. Unsurprisingly, if you compare the list of “most generous” cities with the map of a percentage of religious adherents, it lines up pretty perfectly. (Disclosure: I’m not a sociologist, but I play one on the internet. To really do this correctly, you would need to look at religiousity only of those making over $50,000 a year. This should eliminate, for example, Springfield where both church attendance and income are segregated along racial lines.
None of this is to say that giving to a church doesn’t count as charitable giving. But I think we all know that it’s not quite the same thing as giving to, say, the food bank. But churches do two things. First, they tie attendees into a culture of giving. For some people it’s entirely possible to go through a year without anybody really pushing you to give a serious percentage of your income. Those people don’t go to a church. Second, a donation to a church isn’t a wholly selfless donation. It’s a donation you give to an organization that provides you with some serious social benefits.
In other words, I think the “generosity” of the cities has a lot less to do with the politics of the people living in the city and a lot more to do with whether a particular region has a culture where people making $50,000 or more are expected to belong to a church. I think the suggestion that liberals just like to give away other people’s money or are inherently selfish is a cannard.
But, you know what, screw it. It’s not my job to defend other people’s stinginess. While I don’t think the conservatives should be particularly smug about these statistics, if you’re making more than $50,000 a year, you ought to give away more than 3% on average. So let me try this a bit differently.
Hey, Liberals. Don’t be dicks. Give away more of your money. I know you’ve got 99 problems. We all do.1 But you live in the richest country in the world. If you’re still reading this, you’re clearly educated enough to put up with a decent amount of tedious policy talk. But if you’re not giving away enough that you notice its missing, do more.
Technically I’m down to 43 problems now. My life is pretty good. ↩
I just don’t track my charitable donations for tax time, so according to the IRS, my donations are at 0%, but that’s not an even remotely accurate reflection of what I give. Also, the IRS only tracks monetary donations, not volunteer activities. I just don’t put much salt into these numbers. I think the people who tend to do deductions on their taxes are probably religious or very wealthy, and set aside large amounts of money for one or two organizations/churches only. I think liberals/non-religious people might have a different pattern of giving, which wouldn’t necessarily show up or be easy to track for the IRS.
As far as tithing goes, I’m very skeptical of it as a charitable donation. Having sat through I don’t know how many church finance presentations at church on Sundays growing up, what stuns me is how little of the money goes to actual charitable activities. One local church in particular built a new sanctuary, a new gym, updated the parsonage, got new sound equipment for the band that plays during service, etc., etc. The tithing money rarely went to programs to feed, clothe or otherwise assist local struggling families, in their church or not. Anything like that was done through drives, which members were expected to contribute to in addition to their tithing.
I found a lot of the tithing money went back into programs or facilities that were good/fun for the members, but did not help struggling members of either the church or the surrounding community meet their basic needs. To me, it seemed more like paying dues to be a member of a country club, not charitable giving.
Obviously this is not the case for every church, but my experience with churches left a bad taste in my mouth regarding how chartable they really are.