Nicholas Kristof attempts to shame his fellow liberals into donating more money to charity, given that they are currently getting their butts kicked by conservatives in that department. The column also points out that Europeans donate less than Americans as well, but perhaps we should be forgiving towards them given that they also tend to be poorer.
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in liberals' defense: a lot of the folks i know who do social work, legal aid, etc., are liberals. they make $22k a year.
my one friend is a psychotherapist in the ghettos of oakland. she knocks on doors in these neighborhoods and talks to nutty teenagers, and works about 65 hours a week, w/ 2 weeks vacation, and makes $25k or something.
she doesn't have much disposable income to give to charity, but her job, i'd argue, is a kin to charity work; it's good work.
what these surveys fail to gauge is the disposable income discrepancy.
conversely, you can be a well-to-do conservative housewife in Dallas and give $30,000 to some anti-abortion charity. and that's great. but you sit home all day making cookies, complaining about social issue x, y, z, while across town some 19 year old is tutoring some kid, and is unable to give money to charity.
a % of a $70,000 salary goes a lot farther than $ 22k.
so before we brand "liberals" as hypocrites, let's a) admit to the flaws in the methodology and b) acknowledge that actually doing something tangible and meaningful, in the trenches as it were - for virtually no money at all - is just as powerful as cutting a check.
my "liberal" friends who work these tough jobs and use their disposal income for, say, rent, rather than charity, are not hypocrites.
and being a "conservative" who cuts a check once a year, clean and easy, doesn't make you better than anyone else.
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