The Sad Truth About Those Not-So-Compassionate Liberals!

The Truth
About Those “Compassionate Liberals”

Although liberals claim to be the “compassionate”
ones, although they declare that conservatives are “mean-spirited”
when they oppose liberals' government give-aways and when they attempt to
reform welfare, the truth is that liberals are only compassionate
with other people's money, and are much less likely to give away any
of their own, and even less likely to donate blood than conservatives are. The following
comes from a book by Professor Arthur C. Brooks, Syracuse University
– "Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About
Compassionate Conservatism."

"-- Although liberal families' incomes average 6
percent higher than those of conservative families,
conservative-headed households give, on average, 30 percent more to
charity than the average liberal-headed household ($1,600 per year
vs. $1,227).

-- Conservatives also donate more time and give more
blood.

-- Residents of the states that voted for John Kerry
in 2004 gave smaller percentages of their incomes to charity than did
residents of states that voted for George Bush.

-- Bush carried 24 of the 25 states where charitable
giving was above average.

-- In the 10 reddest states, in which Bush got more
than 60 percent majorities, the average percentage of personal income
donated to charity was 3.5. Residents of the bluest states, which
gave Bush less than 40 percent, donated just 1.9 percent.

-- People who reject the idea that "government
has a responsibility to reduce income inequality" give an
average of four times more
than people who accept that proposition.”

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/03/conservatives_more_liberal_giv.html

Before any
liberals reading this start to crow about the 6% higher household
income, I would remind them that liberals largely infest coastal areas
like New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco, where the cost of
living is astronomically higher than the heartland where
conservatives generally reside.

But,
you might ask, “What of all of the government programs to help the
'disadvantaged' that liberals have supported over the years, like
federally funded housing projects, establishing a minimum wage, and
welfare – don't those prove that liberals are the ones who really
care for the poor? Not really – every single attempt by the
Federal Government to provide housing, to provide a minimum wage, and
to provide a 'safety net' of income for the poor has been a dismal
failure!

Federally
Funded Housing 'Projects -- As the following excerpt from a piece posted by the Cato Institute indicates, the
landscape in almost every major city in the United States is littered
with failed 'projects' (that is, unless they have already been torn down!) which became instant crime-ridden slums within
a few years, if not months, of their completion.

"By
the early 1960s, public housing was becoming infamous for its crime,
graffiti, smashed windows, and general deterioration, and by the
1970s many projects had become social disasters. A landmark in
government failure occurred in 1972 with the demolition of the
Pruitt-Igoe high-rise public housing complex in St. Louis, which
consisted of 33 11-story apartment buildings. Considered an
"architectural masterpiece" when built in the early 1950s,
the federally funded Pruitt-Igoe project was demolished after
vandalism and crime rendered it uninhabitable. Since then, many more
federal housing initiatives have been launched, but most have
similarly ended up as expensive failures.”
http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/hud/public-housing-and-rental-subsidies."

"Well
then,” you may say, “surely the minimum wage has helped the poor
to escape poverty.” The actuality is that the original idea for the
minimum wage came about as a means to aid unions in shutting out
minority workers who were willing to work for a lower wage than the
prevailing union wage. As Economics Professor Walter E. Williams
points out in his new book, “Race
& Economics” (Hoover
Institution Press, Stanford, Ca., 2011), most of the liberal
prevailing 'wisdom' regarding the effects of the minimum wage is pure
myth:

“1.
If
teenagers are allowed to work at subminimum wages, they will be
employed while their parents go unemployed. The
statement assumes that there is a finite number of jobs available,
ie, that the acquisition of a job by one person necessarily means the
loss of a job by another. There is no evidence to support the notion
of a finite job total. . . If youths were exempted from the provision
of minimum wage, there would be some substitutions in employment, but
the overwhelming effect would be that of increasing employment.

“2.
The
employment problem faced by youth and others is that there are simply
no jobs available. If
this myth is accepted at face value, it is the same as saying that
all human wants have been satisfied. It asserts that no one anywhere
wishes to have more of some goods or services that would create
employment opportunities for young people. There is no evidence to
support such an assertion. As with other things of value, quantity
of labor hired conforms to the law of demand: the higher its price,
the less it is used. . . .

“3.
Many
people are unemployed because they have few skills and other
qualifications. Low
skills can explain low wages but not unemployment. The history of
blacks provides concrete evidence. A person is qualified or
unqualified only in a relative sense – that is, relative to some
wage. . . This
kind of artificial disqualification [minimum wage laws] applies
directly to the problems minorities face in the labor market. It is
frequently said that they have a high unemployment rate because of
their low skills. In earlier times, however, minorities had much
lower
unemployment rates . . . The real reason is that through the
political mechanism (intentionally and unintentionally), many blacks
have been made artificially unqualified.

“4.
Widespread
automation causes high unemployment rates among a large portion of
the labor force. First,
increases in relative wages are a proximate cause of automation: when
wages rise relative to capital costs, firms have incentives to
substitute capital for labor. For example, when elevator operators
successfully negotiated a higher wage, their success was followed, a
few years later, by the widespread installation of automatic
elevators. . . The very reason nations raise their higher standards
of living is a result of capital being used to replace labor, thereby
freeing up that labor to undertake other tasks. . . .

“5.
Higher
minimum wages give workers increased purchasing power that in turn
sustains high employment.
This myth assumes that workers keep their jobs and work the same
number of hour as before. Some workers will and some will not.
Those who lose their jobs as a result of a hypothetical right to earn
$5.85 an hour will find that the hypothetical right will not buy
groceries and housing. Furthermore, higher wages are not the same
thing as more purchasing power when the artificial wage increases
give rise to political forces to create inflation.

“6.
The
minimum wage is an antipoverty weapon. If
this were true, we would have an instant solution to the world's
poverty and underdevelopment problems. We would just advise
countries to raise their minimum wage. The sad fact is that
low-skilled workers are not so much under-paid as they are
under-skilled. The way to help them is to make them more productive.
This cannot be done with a stroke of the legislative pen." W. Williams,
“Race
& Economics”,
supra, pp. 53-55

Regarding
welfare,
is there anyone out there, aside from Barack Obama, who
would argue that the welfare programs of LBJ's “Great Society”,
including AFDC (Aid to Families With Dependent Children –
originally established by FDR in 1935) did anything other than
perpetuate reliance on hand-outs from the government, rather than
helping the needy to get on their feet and fend for themselves? The
American people so overwhelmingly supported the Welfare Reform Act of
the Republican Congresses of the 1990s that Bill Clinton finally
signed the act into law, the third time around.Now Barack Obama has
gutted the act, essentially repealing an act of Congress by executive
fiat!

So
no, not only are liberals not all that compassionate in their
personal lives (one might even call them "stingy" or "selfish",
adjectives they love to heap on their opponents) , their politics are
anything but compassionate!