If liberals care more for the little guy, why do conservatives give more to charity?

[Vic]

Originally posted by: 1EZduzit

Originally posted by: CPA
I see most of you missed the 20/20 special John Stossel had the other night which had the SU Professor on to talk about his study. It was very enlightening. Of course, anything that puts Libs in a bad spotlight is automatically slammed on this board, so it doesn't surprise me of some of the comments so far.

WOW, you mean somebody even takes John Stossel seriously? He's a bigger tool/fool then Rush.

Perhaps you would care to elaborate on that beyond childish insults? Has Rush won 19 Emmy awards? Is Rush a leader in AIDS and drug abuse philantropy?

 

[bamacre]

Originally posted by: Craig234
It's my view that private charity can't begin to touch the good our society can do acting through government

I have two problems with this statement.

1. You must ask yourself, "what is good?" Is doing "good" through force (taxation) really "good?" I would rather someone do something nice for me via an act of kindness, not because they were forced to do it.

2. Government is corrupt, there is no other greater source of corruption. I fail to see how any government could do a better job than a private orginization created soley to help however needs it.

 

[Genx87]

Originally posted by: Steeplerot

Originally posted by: Craig234
Bumbo. Whatever bumbo is.

I think it is Texan for "I have no clue wtf I am talking about so I am going to use a dumbass word like bumbo"

That must it since I am from blue MN

 

[Vic]

Originally posted by: Genx87

Originally posted by: Steeplerot

Originally posted by: Craig234
Bumbo. Whatever bumbo is.

I think it is Texan for "I have no clue wtf I am talking about so I am going to use a dumbass word like bumbo"

That must it since I am from blue MN

And I live in Multnomah county, Oregon -- the 3rd bluest county in the country after Manhattan and San Francisco.

The problem I have (and have always had) with these fools is that they think they're Democrats and liberals when they're really radical leftists.

 

[Genx87]

Originally posted by: Vic

Originally posted by: Genx87

Originally posted by: Steeplerot

Originally posted by: Craig234
Bumbo. Whatever bumbo is.

I think it is Texan for "I have no clue wtf I am talking about so I am going to use a dumbass word like bumbo"

That must it since I am from blue MN

And I live in Multnomah county, Oregon -- the 3rd bluest county in the country after Manhattan and San Francisco.

The problem I have (and have always had) with these fools is that they think they're Democrats and liberals when they're really radical leftists.

Oh i dont think we are far behind, honestly. Luckily for me I can if needed get out of dodge and head to Fargo. I still have ties in the area and their state income tax rate is pretty low.

 

[1EZduzit]

Originally posted by: Vic

Originally posted by: Steeplerot

Originally posted by: Vic
This is because the core attitudes of socialism are economic selfishness and coercion. Helping the poor is just a slogan to them, not an actual agenda.

It is a shame we cannot donate the bvllshit you speak in here all day to fertilize countless Saharan farms.

Truth hurts, huh rot? How much do you give? And if you're too poor to donate actual money, then how much time do you volunteer?

Oh wait... whoa... that's right... you're far more concerned with how much other people give, aren't you?

Truth? Yeah, the conservatives are just soooo, soooo concerned about the poor, that's why they are standing in line to raise the minimum wage.

Really Vic, sometimes I think you wouldn't know the truth if you were drowning in it. Like this statment:

Originally posted by: Vic
This is because the core attitudes of socialism are economic selfishness and coercion. Helping the poor is just a slogan to them, not an actual agenda.

The bolded part seems to me to be a more accurate description of the current state of capitalism in this country. I still think that most conservatives are more likely to contribute to charity because of a guilty conscience then any real concern for the less fortunate.

 

[bamacre]

Originally posted by: Vic
The reason charitable donations are tax deductible (NOT write-offs, there is a difference but I don't expect rot to understand it) is because every dollar given privately to charities is a dollar that the government doesn't have to fund to charities (or social program equivalents). The government still comes out ahead, however, because donations being tax deductions as opposed to write-offs means that the actual tax burden of the donator is only reduced by the percentage amount of his tax bracket, i.e. by pennies on the dollar.

I think my work is done here.

I was looking for that. Thanks, saved me some time.

Now if people like Rot could only understand this.... :roll:

 

[JD50]

Originally posted by: Steeplerot

Originally posted by: Corbett

Watch what happens to all these "giving" peoples donations if they cant leech it back.
It will dry right up.

So then i guess that "loophole" is there on purpose then eh? It promotes giving!

No it promotes a welfare state for religious institutions with all of our tax monies, if you want a church(s) build your own, not on my dime.

How is it on your dime? If I give 100 dollars to a church, then I deduct that from MY taxes. So I get the money back that I paid the government in taxes. Where do you fall into the equation?

Try not being so selfish, you are hoping that the government will stop making donations to charities tax deductible just to prove a point. Who cares about the poor and needy that utilize those services right? That is retarded and childish.

 

[Vic]

Originally posted by: bamacre

Originally posted by: Craig234
It's my view that private charity can't begin to touch the good our society can do acting through government

I have two problems with this statement.

1. You must ask yourself, "what is good?" Is doing "good" through force (taxation) really "good?" I would rather someone do something nice for me via an act of kindness, not because they were forced to do it.

2. Government is corrupt, there is no other greater source of corruption. I fail to see how any government could do a better job than a private orginization created soley to help however needs it.

My own inputs:

1. I look on this as similar to the fundie religious attitude of saving peoples' souls in spite of themselves. If you look closely, the attitude of we're going to make you do right whether you want to or not is absolutely identical. They just have different ways of going about it.

2. They actually know this one all too well. Much like the fundie right knows that government is corrupt but still wants to use the force and power of government for to stop people from having abortions, it is their selfish desire to abuse the power of government for their own interests that has them overlook the corruption.

 

[1EZduzit]

Originally posted by: Vic

Originally posted by: 1EZduzit

Originally posted by: CPA
I see most of you missed the 20/20 special John Stossel had the other night which had the SU Professor on to talk about his study. It was very enlightening. Of course, anything that puts Libs in a bad spotlight is automatically slammed on this board, so it doesn't surprise me of some of the comments so far.

WOW, you mean somebody even takes John Stossel seriously? He's a bigger tool/fool then Rush.

Perhaps you would care to elaborate on that beyond childish insults? Has Rush won 19 Emmy awards? Is Rush a leader in AIDS and drug abuse philantropy?

What part of John Stossel is a tool/fool don't you get? I really don't see how I can be more specific then that. I think he's trying to be the next Rush.

 

[1EZduzit]

Originally posted by: Kwaipie
I wonder what Cheney's charities were.

Well we know Barbara Bush donated a large sum to her son's company and took a tax deduction for it. Such generosity just humbles me. :laugh:

 

[daniel49]

Originally posted by: eskimospy

Originally posted by: daniel49

.2 is not much of a gain and there have been a lot of claims of inflated subscriber bases/
In addition it is still way behind usa today and wall street journal
http://www.infoplease.com/ipea/A0004420.html

liberal bias? even the NY times admits that

[edit] Self-examination of bias
In summer 2004, the newspaper's then public editor (ombudsman), Daniel Okrent, wrote a piece on the Times' alleged liberal bias.[28] He concluded that the Times did have a liberal bias in coverage of certain social issues, gay marriage being the example he used. He claimed that this bias reflected the paper's cosmopolitanism, which arose naturally from its roots as a hometown paper of New York City.

Okrent did not comment at length on the issue of bias in coverage of "hard news", such as fiscal policy, foreign policy, or civil liberties. However, he noted that the paper's coverage of the Iraq war was, among other things, insufficiently critical of the George W. Bush administration (see below). In May 2005 Okrent was succeeded by Byron Calame.

Additionally in a post-Jayson Blair report to Bill Keller,[29] a committee of Times employees noted:

Nothing we recommend should be seen as endorsing a retreat from tough-minded reporting of abuses of power by public or private institutions. In part because the Times ' editorial page is clearly liberal, the news pages do need to make more effort not to seem monolit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times#Self-examination_of_bias

I'm not sure how your post is relevant to what I wrote. I suggest you read it again, this time for comprehension. I never said that the NYT was the largest paper in the country. I only took issue with the fact that you said that it's subscription base was shrinking, I cited a reputable third party that said it wasn't.

I also never said that the NYT was not a leftist paper. (although I do think that reports of its bias are greatly exaggerated). I said that newspaper circulation was shrinking by and large due to fundamental changes in the ways that Americans get their news, not due to people being turned off by the editorial slant. This is supported by the broad based, 20 year decline of newspapers regardless of editorial ideology.

I know that as soon as you see a posting defending something about the NYT, your brain probably immediately jumps to that argument that's been had a million times over the possibility of editorial bias there. Unfortunately for you, that's not what's being talked about today. In fact, while its not relevant to what I said its REALLY not relevant to this thread.

My original point (that was relevant) was that people don't want to read about that sort of news... because it is boring. It's the same reason why good news usually ends up on page 5, and the missing baby is front page. Bad things are interesting, good ones... usually not so much.

Edit: Oh yeah, and no matter what your ideology Dick Cheney shooting an old man in the face was insanely hilarious.

now your boring me am cancelling you from thread

 

[Craig234]

Originally posted by: bamacre

Originally posted by: Craig234
It's my view that private charity can't begin to touch the good our society can do acting through government

I have two problems with this statement.

1. You must ask yourself, "what is good?" Is doing "good" through force (taxation) really "good?" I would rather someone do something nice for me via an act of kindness, not because they were forced to do it. [q/]

That's fine for birthday presents and feel-good acts of kindness. However, you have to deal with reality when choosing policies.

Our government found this out when they tried the less coercive 'Articles of Confederation', to have more states' rights; it failed, and they passwed the constitution.

You can't have an efffective policy on many issues based on charitable donations. We as a society drew the line that when a majority can agree to spend on something, all help.

It's up to the public not to abuse that power. The alternative to having that power, though, is a society where power is concerntrated, as in most of human history in a few hands.

And that's tyranny. If there's one thing democracy is about, it's spreading the power that exists in the real world, outside libertarian fantasies, to the public rather than having it in the hands of a king/warlord/robber baron/emperor/Chairman of the CCCP/whatever other title the centralized power takes on. It *required* the government to take the United States out of the terrible days when Americans made an average $10,000 a year a century ago (adjusted for inflation), in unsafe conditions with their children working too.

Private power is just another form of feudalism, it's not some sort of 'freedom'. Democracy, where the public has power, is what brings freedom.

2. Government is corrupt, there is no other greater source of corruption. I fail to see how any government could do a better job than a private orginization created soley to help however needs it.

That's ideological garbage. Sometimes, government can be corrupted by the private interests; the American revolution was mostly about the corrupt relationship between the government of England and the largest corporation in the world, who the government gace special legal privileges too, in a conflict of interest. But democracy means the government is accountable to the people, in principle, in contrast to the unaccountable power of private elites. It's imperfect, but far better than most of human history.

 

[bamacre]

To further explain, a little, what Vic said, charitable donations are tax deductible. They are subtracted from your taxable income, which is completely different from what one actually pays in taxes.

One does not give a charitable donation SOLEY to deduct what they would pay in taxes. It's not in their financial interest to do so. They are only getting back a percentage of what they gave to charity. That percentage is based on their taxable income. Now, the ONLY exception would be if one were to decrease their taxable income to help them fall into a lower tax bracket, but this would only be beneficial to someone who is very close to the lower tax bracket. I'm sure CPA can correct me if I am wrong here (my accounting background is only from college, not actual experience).

To think that one would give to a charity only so they could deduct it from their taxes is totally ignorant of the way out tax system works.

 

[Vic]

Originally posted by: 1EZduzit

Originally posted by: Vic

Originally posted by: Steeplerot

Originally posted by: Vic
This is because the core attitudes of socialism are economic selfishness and coercion. Helping the poor is just a slogan to them, not an actual agenda.

It is a shame we cannot donate the bvllshit you speak in here all day to fertilize countless Saharan farms.

Truth hurts, huh rot? How much do you give? And if you're too poor to donate actual money, then how much time do you volunteer?

Oh wait... whoa... that's right... you're far more concerned with how much other people give, aren't you?

Truth? Yeah, the conservatives are just soooo, soooo concerned about the poor, that's why they are standing in line to raise the minimum wage.

Really Vic, sometimes I think you wouldn't know the truth if you were drowning in it. Like this statment:

Originally posted by: Vic
This is because the core attitudes of socialism are economic selfishness and coercion. Helping the poor is just a slogan to them, not an actual agenda.

The bolded part seems to me to be a more accurate description of the current state of capitalism in this country. I still think that most conservatives are more likely to contribute to charity because of a guilty conscience then any real concern for the less fortunate.

1. John Stossel is not a conservative.

2. Capitalism is the economics of free and voluntary associations. Would you care to explain to me what is selfish or coercive about that? Especially in this context of using government force as "charity"?

I see the truth all too clearly unfortunately. It's you and those like you who are awash in doublethink, slogans, bitterness, hate, force, and half-assed bullsh!t. All those minimum wage arguments we had, I told you repeatedly that I was never opposed to the minimum wage, I just wanted you to explain to me what good it does (because only started from there could we understand how best to improve it). But you never did that (in fact, I would have to volunteer the positives), you would just keep attacking me for daring to even question your rhetoric. This is typical of all of you, sad to say.

 

[Vic]

Originally posted by: 1EZduzit

Originally posted by: Vic

Originally posted by: 1EZduzit

Originally posted by: CPA
I see most of you missed the 20/20 special John Stossel had the other night which had the SU Professor on to talk about his study. It was very enlightening. Of course, anything that puts Libs in a bad spotlight is automatically slammed on this board, so it doesn't surprise me of some of the comments so far.

WOW, you mean somebody even takes John Stossel seriously? He's a bigger tool/fool then Rush.

Perhaps you would care to elaborate on that beyond childish insults? Has Rush won 19 Emmy awards? Is Rush a leader in AIDS and drug abuse philantropy?

What part of John Stossel is a tool/fool don't you get? I really don't see how I can be more specific then that. I think he's trying to be the next Rush.

Case in point.

 

[bamacre]

Originally posted by: Vic

Originally posted by: 1EZduzit

Originally posted by: Vic

Originally posted by: 1EZduzit

Originally posted by: CPA
I see most of you missed the 20/20 special John Stossel had the other night which had the SU Professor on to talk about his study. It was very enlightening. Of course, anything that puts Libs in a bad spotlight is automatically slammed on this board, so it doesn't surprise me of some of the comments so far.

WOW, you mean somebody even takes John Stossel seriously? He's a bigger tool/fool then Rush.

Perhaps you would care to elaborate on that beyond childish insults? Has Rush won 19 Emmy awards? Is Rush a leader in AIDS and drug abuse philantropy?

What part of John Stossel is a tool/fool don't you get? I really don't see how I can be more specific then that. I think he's trying to be the next Rush.

Case in point.

:laugh:

He dug the hole and pushed himself right on in. :laugh:

 

[feralkid]

Originally posted by: Genx87

Originally posted by: Vic

Originally posted by: Genx87

Originally posted by: Steeplerot

Originally posted by: Craig234
Bumbo. Whatever bumbo is.

I think it is Texan for "I have no clue wtf I am talking about so I am going to use a dumbass word like bumbo"

That must it since I am from blue MN

And I live in Multnomah county, Oregon -- the 3rd bluest county in the country after Manhattan and San Francisco.

The problem I have (and have always had) with these fools is that they think they're Democrats and liberals when they're really radical leftists.

Oh i dont think we are far behind, honestly. Luckily for me I can if needed get out of dodge and head to Fargo. I still have ties in the area and their state income tax rate is pretty low.

Please don't leave butt marks on the door.

 

[daniel49]

Originally posted by: Kwaipie
I wonder what Cheney's charities were.

Recipients of their charitable donations included George Washington University Medical Faculty Associates for the benefit of the Cardiothoracic Institute, the University of Wyoming Foundation and Capital Partners for Education, to benefit low-income high school students in the Washington area.


http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-04-14-bush-taxes_x.htm

 

[Genx87]

Originally posted by: feralkid

Originally posted by: Genx87

Originally posted by: Vic

Originally posted by: Genx87

Originally posted by: Steeplerot

Originally posted by: Craig234
Bumbo. Whatever bumbo is.

I think it is Texan for "I have no clue wtf I am talking about so I am going to use a dumbass word like bumbo"

That must it since I am from blue MN

And I live in Multnomah county, Oregon -- the 3rd bluest county in the country after Manhattan and San Francisco.

The problem I have (and have always had) with these fools is that they think they're Democrats and liberals when they're really radical leftists.

Oh i dont think we are far behind, honestly. Luckily for me I can if needed get out of dodge and head to Fargo. I still have ties in the area and their state income tax rate is pretty low.

Please don't leave butt marks on the door.

Dont worry when I bolt from the ill fated policies it will be so fast no door will be able to touch this ass

 

[Genx87]

Originally posted by: daniel49

Originally posted by: Kwaipie
I wonder what Cheney's charities were.

Recipients of their charitable donations included George Washington University Medical Faculty Associates for the benefit of the Cardiothoracic Institute, the University of Wyoming Foundation and Capital Partners for Education, to benefit low-income high school students in the Washington area.


http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-04-14-bush-taxes_x.htm

The horror, oh the humanity!

 

[jrenz]

This probably has a lot to do with the other study which showed overwhelmingly that Republicans are generally happier, and have a more positive outlook on life, than Democrats. When you don't view yourself as a victim of everything in the world, you're probably more likely to be charitable toward others.

 

[Vic]

Originally posted by: Genx87

Originally posted by: Vic

Originally posted by: Genx87

Originally posted by: Steeplerot

Originally posted by: Craig234
Bumbo. Whatever bumbo is.

I think it is Texan for "I have no clue wtf I am talking about so I am going to use a dumbass word like bumbo"

That must it since I am from blue MN

And I live in Multnomah county, Oregon -- the 3rd bluest county in the country after Manhattan and San Francisco.

The problem I have (and have always had) with these fools is that they think they're Democrats and liberals when they're really radical leftists.

Oh i dont think we are far behind, honestly. Luckily for me I can if needed get out of dodge and head to Fargo. I still have ties in the area and their state income tax rate is pretty low.

My point is that they don't represent the views of the many Dems and liberals that I know personally in real life. They do, however, represent the views of the many outspoken socialists and ultra-left radicals that I have met. Otherwise, rot is as much your typical dem as McVeigh was a typical pub.

 

[Craig234]

Originally posted by: jrenz
This probably has a lot to do with the other study which showed overwhelmingly that Republicans are generally happier, and have a more positive outlook on life, than Democrats. When you don't view yourself as a victim of everything in the world, you're probably more likely to be charitable toward others.

Democrats understand better the problems the republicans are causing the nation and the world. They say ignorance is bliss.

 

[sandorski]

Originally posted by: daniel49

Originally posted by: Kwaipie
I wonder what Cheney's charities were.

Recipients of their charitable donations included George Washington University Medical Faculty Associates for the benefit of the Cardiothoracic Institute, the University of Wyoming Foundation and Capital Partners for Education, to benefit low-income high school students in the Washington area.


http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-04-14-bush-taxes_x.htm

The first could certainly be considered Self-Serving.