This study found young liberals to make the least charitable contributions of all, whether in money, time or blood. Idealism in words is not idealism in deeds.
That was from Who Really Cares?, which addressed the myth that Liberals are more generous than Conservatives. This is in addition to Liberals being bad at basic economics. So other than being “generous” with other people’s money and not knowing their subject, they are doing a great job.
I’m no cheerleader for banks or credit card companies (unlike some celebrities who do ads for banks). I just know that the problems with the bailouts and the mortgage meltdown were due more to politicians than the bankers.
Here’s more:
More frightening than any particular beliefs or policies is an utter lack of any sense of a need to test those beliefs and policies against hard evidence. Mistakes can be corrected by those who pay attention to facts but dogmatism will not be corrected by those who are wedded to a vision.
One of the most pervasive political visions of our time is the vision of liberals as compassionate and conservatives as less caring. It is liberals who advocate “forgiveness” of loans to third-world countries, a “living wage” for the poor and a “safety net” for all.
But these are all government policies — not individual acts of compassion — and the actual empirical consequences of such policies are of remarkably little interest to those who advocate them. Depending on what those consequences are, there may be good reasons to oppose them, so being for or against these policies may tell us nothing about who is compassionate or caring and who is not.
A new book, titled Who Really Cares by Arthur C. Brooks examines the actual behavior of liberals and conservatives when it comes to donating their own time, money, or blood for the benefit of others. It is remarkable that beliefs on this subject should have become conventional, if not set in concrete, for decades before anyone bothered to check these beliefs against facts.
Hat tip to Pastor Timothy for this quote by Penn Gillette:
Eternity Matters 
In James 2, James put forth the basic fact that human beings will always act on what they truly believe. Do you suppose it could be said that Al Gore doesn’t really believe in global warming (given the fact that he hasn’t changed his lifestyle to correspond) or that liberals don’t really believe in charity (since they haven’t changed their lifestyle’s to correspond)? (Rhetorical question.)
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It has been the same statistics for decades – liberals always give less to charitable causes that actually help people. They donate to all the enviro-wacko stuff and every other far left cause. But helping people isn’t on their personal agendas; to them that’s the government’s job.
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don’t believe everything your hear or read. young people (liberals or conservative) don’t have the money to give. re:enviro-wacko— are you crazy? do you like eating fish with mercury? or do you just chose to ignore the health issues?
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First of all, I believe that Brooks showed that even on secular causes like environmental issues, the conservatives give more on average. Secondly, one needn’t have lots of money to donate something.
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Not at all. I just know there are limits, such as not shutting down a whole community in California because it MIGHT be harming some little fish.
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That wasn’t the point. It was that liberal youth give less time/money/blood than conservative youth, yet they protest and claim that others should be doing more. Hypocrites.
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Many of my liberal friends give a lot of their time and money to charity; they’ve flown halfway around the world to help kids in Africa, started charities, give blood, and donate their time. But then again, ,it’s a self-selecting group: the other type of liberal makes me freakin mental.
The blood one was interesting: college campuses are full of liberals, and they do frequent blood drives, so you think that is one that liberals would trump in. Not so much.
The entire “conservatives are not compassionate” thing is an exercise in projection. Liberals know that they wouldn’t give a cent of their own money to the poor without the government forcing them to do it, so they assume that we are all the same way. Conservatives, on the other hand, think that we give what we can and that we are the best judges of our abilities to give and our limits, as well as to whom the money should go.
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