Today's Blog: Time for the Guv to morph into Chris Christie My husband and I and a couple hundred friends watched in Green Bay as ...(more) Search Archives

Blogs

Time for the Guv to morph into Chris Christie (6/28/2011)

Time for Gov. Walker to talk more about the cake (3/4/2011)

Today, reality hits home (3/1/2011)

FoxPolitics News going on hiatus (1/28/2011)

Brown County Executive candidate forum Feb. 8 (1/28/2011)

Education done right (1/27/2011)

To Obama, the ‘We’ is Government (1/27/2011)

(more)

Scott Walker, still delusional and thinking he will be crowned as emperor of Wisconsin on Jan. 3, has proposed a radical change in the way Wisconsin government makes administrative rules, which cover a host of activities, large and small.

Walker also appears under the illusion that some anonymous, pointy-headed bureaucrats make all these rules, and that it is really inconvenient for businesses to have to follow them and behave responsibly.

….So elected officials have the last word.

When it comes to voluntarily spreading their own wealth around, a distinct "charity gap" opens up between Americans who are for and against government income leveling. Your intuition might tell you that people who favor government redistribution care most about the less fortunate and would give more to charity. Initially, this was my own assumption. But the data tell a different story.

The most recent year that a large, nonpartisan survey asked people about both redistributive beliefs and charitable giving was 1996. That year, the General Social Survey (GSS) found that those who were against higher levels of government redistribution privately gave four times as much money, on average, as people who were in favor of redistribution. This is not all church-related giving; they also gave about 3.5 times as much to nonreligious causes. Anti-redistributionists gave more even after correcting for differences in income, age, religion and education.

…. 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.

Obviously, not all charity has ideological connotations—nor should it. But for many, especially at this time of year, giving is a cheerful, productive protest vote against the growing state. It is America's quiet tea party.

Always looking on the bright side of things Dennis? Geesh. You so often decide that what's written here isn't on topic or isn't the right topic or isn't complete or some such thing. As you know, you have an open invitation to write what you<.i> think should be written on my blog. Blessings to you and your family as we celebrate the wondrous birth - and life - of our Lord.

Jo (Fri Dec 24 15:18:21 2010)

---

Post a Reply

Print this Article

Email Article to a Friend