Sweet Hypocrisy

By Joe Gruters

Here’s an inconvenient truth: If you were hungry

or needy in this nation and there was not the

thick welfare net to land on, you would pray that

your neighbors were conservatives. And that

would be particularly true if you were a minority.

 

Ben Cohen’s Amend-O-Matic Stamp Mobile in Sarasota last week.

 

The Hypocrisy Machine rolled into Sarasota last week in the form of the Amend-O-Matic StampMobile piloted by Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream. Cohen is a well-known liberal and big Democrat financial donor, but his contraption runs under the banner of “Stamp Money Out of Politics.” Run a greenback through it and it will deface it with the banner in red letters.

Cohen alone has donated more than a $155,000 of his own money to Democrats since 1988. Unions donate tens of millions to Democrats. Hollywood and coastal elites contributes tens of millions to Democrats. And then there are the boundless in-kind donations of the national media, which are not IRS reportable.

But that is not the money, Cohen wants to stamp out of politics. That money is OK. It’s corporate donations that he is after, and he is perfectly comfortable using his large amount of corporate-derived money to fund his own PR machine limiting it for others.

Specifically, he is after the Citizens United decision that reaffirmed that money equals political speech access. Cohen utilizes that concept, of course, he just doesn’t want those he disagrees with to have the same freedoms. All Cohen really wants is to stamp conservative money out of politics.

Cohen comes through a long line of hypocrisy on the left when dealing with money.

Consider charitable giving. Liberals proclaim themselves to care more about the poor and needy than conservatives — and that is the nice way of putting their rhetoric. But it turns out that only appears to be the case when they are using other people’s money, such as taxpayers that include corporations. And conservatives know instinctively that keeping the poor trapped in welfare nets is not compassionate.

Arthur C. Brooks, in his book, Who Really Cares – America’s Charity Divide, combed through mountains of data to find this reality:

“Liberal families earned an average of 6 percent more per year than conservative families, but conservative families gave more than liberal families within every income class, from poor to middle class to rich. Despite their lower earnings, conservative households in America donate 30 percent more money to charity each year than liberal households.”

A Google study found an even greater disproportion between conservatives’ giving and liberals’ giving, suggesting that conservatives give about twice as much.

Democrats know these stats and try to slough them off on church giving. But even when that is backed out, conservatives still give more. But, we are told, liberals care about those in need! Here’s a stat from Brooks: “A religious person is 57 percent more likely than a secularist to help a homeless person. If liberals gave blood like conservatives do, the blood supply in the U.S. would jump by about 45 percent.”

Hypocrites.

Brooks looked at other data and found people who give charitably express less prejudice than non-givers toward African Americans, Latinos, and Asians.

It should be noted that when Brooks began researching his book, he assumed he would find that liberals were more generous. That was, and is after all, the well-crafted Democrat and media stereotype. The facts ended up forcing him to change his mind and the conclusion of the book.

Brooks looked at the macro level. On the micro level, Vice President Joe Biden is one example among many of the hypocrisy. While safely ensconced in his Senate seat, he typically ponied up about one-tenth of one percent to charity, sometimes less than one-hundredth of one percent. Essentially, nothing. The generous liberal in reality.

Once Biden was running for vice president, he managed to up his giving all the way to 1.5 percent. So even while doing it for crass political gain, he still came up with less than half of what a typical conservative gives — who makes only a fraction of Biden’s income.

Ditto for President and Michelle Obama, whose giving ranged from four-tenths of one percent to 1.2 percent until he ran for office and became president. This, from two stalwart liberals purporting to want to help the poor and needy.

Hypocrites.

Even with the Obamas and Bidens increased giving when running for office, Mitt Romney still gave more than both combined in raw dollars and as a percentage of income. In fact, he gave away 29.4 percent of his income in 2011, which is one big reason his effective tax rate appeared so low. He gave it away!

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is a big Democrat and Obama fan. Presumably he agrees with wringing more money out of American taxpayers to pay for big government. Yet Bloomberg reports that while Facebook is reporting $1.1 billion in pre-tax profits, the company will not only not pay a dime in income taxes but will get about $429 million in “refunds.”

Hypocrites.

Here’s an inconvenient truth: If you were hungry or needy in this nation and there was not the thick welfare net to land on, you would pray that your neighbors were conservatives. And that would be particularly true if you were a minority.

What does this prove? Sanctimonious politics is not charity. Liberals accuse conservatives of being cold-hearted, but they are far less “compassionate” if it actually costs them something. Liberal bumper stickers and cheap slogans mean nothing because so many liberals are only generous when giving away other people’s money — not their own.

Hypocrites.

Thanks for being informed and engaged.

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Ryan’s Budget Protects Defense

Today’s Wall Street Journal features a very important editorial, it’s in its entirety below.

Within a plan to reduce outlays by $6.2 trillion over the next decade, Paul Ryan has found a way to replace $214 billion of the $487 billion in military spending cuts in Obama’s budget.

By ARTHUR C. BROOKS, EDWIN J. FEULNER AND WILLIAM KRISTOL

In an election year, it’s all too easy for politicians to defer hard choices until after the polls have closed in November. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) has taken the more difficult road with his “Path to Prosperity” budget.

Mr. Ryan’s plan has received much attention for tackling America’s spiraling expenditures on entitlements and domestic discretionary spending. Less reported is the budget’s partial restoration of national defense as the No. 1 priority of the federal government.

Even within the framework of a plan to reduce outlays by $6.2 trillion over the next decade, Mr. Ryan has found a way to replace $214 billion of the $487 billion in military spending reductions that are in Barack Obama’s budget. And he has done so while avoiding the tax increases proposed by the president.

Conservatives recognize that they have to deal with fiscal reality and get the federal government’s balance sheet in order. That is why Mr. Ryan’s plan is so bold. It does not cut indiscriminately, focusing instead on the true drivers of our spending crisis and recognizing that tax increases would worsen our economic situation.

The Ryan plan also helps to reverse what Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has called the “catastrophic” process of sequestration—the year-after-year, automatic cuts agreed to in last summer’s debt-limit deal between the president and the House leadership. These cuts will eviscerate the United States military if Congress does not quickly pass a law to undo them this year. Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has made plain the consequences of sequestration: “We would no longer be a global power.”

The contrast between the House Republican budget and that of our current commander-in-chief is striking. President Obama has been arguing that raising taxes is the only solution to sequestration that he will accept. In other words, he asks the nation to decide between higher taxes and a weaker defense. Mr. Ryan rejects either solution.

Instead, Mr. Ryan takes some important first steps toward facing up to the true drivers of the federal government’s money woes: spending through “entitlement” programs. These now consume roughly 60% of the federal budget, up from 20% in 1970. In contrast, national defense, which comprised nearly 40% of the budget in the 1970s, costs less than 20% today, even with current war spending. Absent reform, entitlements will spiral upward and crowd out all other federal spending—not just on the military.

It’s incorrect to regard entitlements as mandatory programs. They reflect political choices about what kind of country we want and how we will govern ourselves. If we fail to reform entitlements, we’ll go on pretending we can afford a retirement with benefits we never earned, paid for by our children and grandchildren. We’ll be choosing an ever-more socialized medical system. We will in effect choose to become a European-style—and unsustainable—welfare state.

We will also be choosing to lay aside the burdens and inconveniences of world leadership. Mr. Obama insists that he doesn’t believe America is in decline. But his redistributionist policies at home and his preference for “leading from behind” abroad can only be regarded as making exactly that choice.

The Ryan budget is not perfect for some conservatives. Many would like to see American military spending restored more rapidly and an even more aggressive approach to tackling the entitlement problem. But Mr. Ryan’s budget is a choice about our future, and this is a time to choose—not hide behind the sequestration process.

If we want a strong America in a dangerous world, and a freer and growing economy for our citizens, it’s time to choose the direction that Mr. Ryan is charting.

Mr. Brooks is president of the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Feulner is president of the Heritage Foundation. Mr. Kristol is a director of the Foreign Policy Initiative. Their three organizations compose the Defending Defense coalition.

A version of this article appeared Mar. 28, 2012, on page A13 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Ryan’s Budget Protects Defense.