Every once in a while, AWA and I, and sometimes others, get into conversations about charity. On Sunday, I went to pick up a (lightly) used recumbent bike for my hubby, and the person we got it from was obviously well off. The grounds were fenced in tasteful stone, with carvings of animals romping on top, and the land itself was meticulously well kept. The gentleman was older, and he’d apparently purchased the bike for his wife, who was now disabled and unable to use it. He wanted it to go to someone who would get good use of it. We took it, very thankful because it was much needed, and we can’t afford such luxuries.
This is the way the Right handles charity. They give personally. They give to people they can see for themselves are needy in some way. They tend to give to specific people, and to registered charities that they know are doing good in areas that they care about. Think Salvation Army and various church groups.
The Left often accuses the Right of not caring, and not giving. That’s never been my understanding. I see those on the Right (even the ones I consider to be “far right wing nuts”) consistently giving to those in need. They give at a community level, so they can see their dollars at work. They give it during disasters, en masse.
The Left does give to charity, it’s true. Most will help a close friend in need, if pressed. But mostly, they want to give in very anonymous ways. They give to charities directly off their payroll, so they don’t see it or feel it. They give at the government level, so they don’t have to hand it over out of their cash on hand. It’s impersonal.
Obviously this is an over generalization of the situation, but it’s something I see time and again. The Left get SO upset over what they see as the Right “not giving and not caring” and I’ve never understood that. They do give, lots. Americans as a whole tend to give a lot, and the mix of the impersonal Left and the very personal Right seems to work.
The only part that I have real issues with is when charity becomes something more, something not just accepted when necessary, but demanded. The Right is very good at giving a “hand up” most of the time, and a lot of that (IMO) comes from the fact that they want to see and interact with the people who are getting the money or goods. The Left, being more hands-off in their approach, seem to see it all as “someone else’s money” and therefore easy to throw away.
I remember going to an LDS cannery to pick up some canned long-term storage items some years ago. When we were there, their minister (not the right term but I don’t actually know the right one) was there to meet with a young couple. It seems the young couple had come in for help (which is fine… that’s why they have their internal charity), but then hadn’t moved to get OFF the help. The hand up had turned into a hand out, and the minister wasn’t having any of it.
That is how charity should work. No one at an upper government level has even the faintest clue whether I actually need money or not. But Bob down the street has at least a clue, because he sees me at the store, counting change to put gas in my car. Bob knows I volunteer and do things for the town, to make up for what I take. (This is hypothetical, by the by; I am not on the dole at this point in my life, but I have been.)
I don’t think that it’s wrong to want your charity donations to just disappear out of your check. If that’s how you want to give, go for it. I’m glad you’re giving. Me, I want to see the people I’m giving it to. That’s just me. I like to know that my money isn’t being used to pay someone’s overhead salary instead of for food for the widowed mother down the road. But there’s room for both types of giving. Giving is good, for body and soul.
My problem with the Charity offered by the Left (especially the ultra wealthy Left) is they want to do their virtue signaling charity by giving away my f’n money.
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All those kind, compassionate, open borders, “No One Is Illegal”, asylum for all Democrats are really, really happy to spend government money (my tax dollars) to help the illegal aliens they opened the borders for and invited into our country illegally.
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I don’t see George Soros, the Kennedys, Clintons, Pelosis, or any Rich Democrat peeling off a wad of their own personal cash to feed the asylum seekers or provide them shelter. I see lots of poor and middle class people giving their own money, but never the rich b—–ds. The rich are more likely to use their wealth and political power to force others like you and me to pay for their virtuous thoughts.
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More likely, the rich will make sure they and their wives and buddies have very, very well paid executive jobs with great benefits running and coordinating and the US Taxpayer financed NGO’s and charities providing services for the illegals, while others work as “contractors and consultants” making thousands of dollars a day billing these same Taxpayer funded NGOs. It is a very lucrative living, which is never shared with the actual unpaid volunteers doing 90% of the real work.
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Don’t like my cold, hurtful, insensitive talk about illegal aliens?
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Replace the words illegal with the drug addicted and mentally ill homeless. How many billions of taxpayer dollars has San Francisco alone paid to “Stop the Homeless Crisis?” Then add LA, NYC, Chicago, and the other 50 largest cities. The taxpayers have spent $100 billion easily in the last year, and the problems have gotten WORSE.
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I agree with you. Person to person charity is best. I just want the wealthy virtue signaling Democrat SOBS to open their own wallet and not mine.
I hear you, rd. The Dems who ARE feeding and housing illegals do so quietly, partly because they’re good people and partly because they don’t want to get shit from their party. I might argue with you over immigration (legal or illegal) but not with what you’re saying here. If people choose to donate to a central fund (gov’t or otherwise) and that’s how they want to do it, fine. I don’t LIKE it, but that’s fine. But don’t take *my* money. Very fair indeed.
I mostly agree.
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BUT? Why a “Central or Government” Fund? Why do Liberals / Democrats / Progressives / Communists/ Nazis have such a fetish for centralization and big impersonal organizations? If you ever want to really abuse someone? You just sick a huge uncaring bureaucracy on them, and tell the bureaucrats to intrusively improve their life. Just ask Maya Kowalski.
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The most disgraceful example? Need anyone remind us about the Clinton Global Crime Family Initiative? All those billions in charitable donations and they built less than a dozen houses in Haiti? But Chelsea’s wedding was spectacular!
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If you don’t want to do it on an individual basis, the local Mormon temple like in your example seems to be effective. Or a different church, synagogue, or mosque. Or the Oddfellows, Moose Lodges, Rotary, Optimists, or the Union Hall.
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One thing I have noticed- many of the uber democrats actually give very little to charity. As you said its virtual signaling… We the People do our part and mostly don’t crow about it. Good article.
Even if wealthy uber-Democrats do give large amounts of money to charity, it’s very little of their income or net worth.
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It’s a Biblical concept. The poor woman who gave two pennies made a greater donation than the rich men giving sacks of coins; they gave from their wealth (i.e. from their excess), but she gave from her poverty (i.e. all she had).
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I’m not saying we should all give everything we have to charity. I’m just saying that we should bear in mind that when the Clintons or Schumers or Pelosis donate $250,000 to a charity, it’s a drop in the bucket of their net worth. Writing such a check would bankrupt most of us, but they won’t even notice the loss.
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That disparity of scale is, in my mind, the difference between real charity and tax write-offs. (I can’t speak for anyone else, but I rarely report my charitable giving to the IRS — first because it’s not likely to significantly reduce my tax liability but does significantly increase my paperwork, and second because that’s just not why I give.)
Archer,
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Lots to unpack here. So totally with you on the Biblical passage. I’m aware of it, and it’s very true. I don’t have a lot… I have problems paying my bills sometimes. I still give money to charity (ones I trust), and I donate food to the food bank even when I’m struggling a bit. I have *enough*… most of the people (in my area at least) who are going to the food bank don’t have enough. I also open my doors. We’ve had errant teens, adults with kids, young adults who were in dire straits, and we opened our home to them. We fed them and clothed them, helped them find jobs, and gave them a true “hand up”. Been paid back by those same people, by watching them do it for others, too. I realize not everyone can do that, but I’m glad to do it, when I’m able.
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I do want to say… when you say that we should “…bear in mind that when the Clintons or Schumers or Pelosis donate $250,000 to a charity, it’s a drop in the bucket of their net worth…” I hear the Left saying, “But those wealthy corporations can AFFORD to do X Y and Z.” I don’t think that’s what you meant, but it definitely read that way to me when I skimmed your response.
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We do sometimes write off charity stuff. There are years when we’ve made more, enough to make a difference… and those are usually the years that we’re feeding spare kids and down on their luck adults. 😉 But not all the time.
I’ll be honest, curby, I don’t look much at the “uber wealthy” on either side. I say way too much virtue signaling. But I do see the Right doing the right thing more often than the Left, by far when it comes to this kind of thing. Which is why this isn’t a “behind enemy lines” article. I’m not behind enemy lines. I’m sitting on the fence, looking left, and going, “…wha?”
Bishop. The head of a LDS ward/church/congregation is called a bishop.
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This dichotomy between Left and Right charity is something I’ve witnessed, as well. The Right prefers to give locally, to see and make sure our donations are going to the people and groups we intended, and when we do give to larger, national or international groups, we tend to be very picky about which ones, for the same reason: we want to see and make sure our donations are being used as we intend. The Left prefers to give to larger charities, I believe in part because larger charities are capable of helping more people; they choose not to see that larger charities with more opaque hierarchies and revenue streams — both incoming and outgoing — are more prone to corruption and grift. (See: Black Lives Matter, and the dozens of 7-figure homes the leaders purchased with charitable funds for their personal use.)
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We spent some time receiving public assistance many years ago. Unlike a lot of people, we got off it as quickly as possible. For far too many, it’s devastating to go into the office and be told, “There’s not much I can do, you no longer qualify.” For us, it was a personal victory. It meant we had achieved financial independence.
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I know many, many people who call anyone on public assistance or charity lazy and stupid. Because we’ve been there, I don’t disparage anyone who receives charity in any form just because they receive charity. Everyone goes through hard times, and some people really do need that extra help while they recover.
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That said, there’s no end to my contempt for people who craft their lives so that they always receive it — the people who refuse to work, or refuse to work more than part-time minimum-wage, or claim disabilities they don’t have, so that they always qualify for “free money”. And yes, I’ve met a bunch of them. Those people are why the stereotype of needy people as “lazy” and “stupid” exists and is so prevalent, and it only harms those with an actual need.
Thanks for the Bishop title. I couldn’t remember. Because we are small time preppers, we tend to run into LDS a lot. Awesome people, really. While their religion is not to my taste, pretty much everything else they do, is. LOL…
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I agree with your commentary about charity. I think the Left equates “bigger” with “more able”, and that’s just not the case. Like, ever. I constantly tell people on the Left, “Would you be happy if you were giving that to the Republicans? No? Then don’t give it to the Democrats, you twit.” Bigger might be able to “get more people” but it loses the ability to judge who actually NEEDS something. When I choose to take someone into my home and help them out, I do so because I can see with my own eyes that they are doing the right stuff, putting the effort in.
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I’ve also been on the dole. I hated it. I despised that I couldn’t take at least part time work while I was on it, to do *something* useful (there were Reasons I couldn’t work full time that don’t belong on a public forum like this), but if I worked at all, I lost ALL my assistance and my kid starved. Not cool. I spent a lot of time being a single mom at home alone, because of that.
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I’d like to see something set up that rewards people for working toward getting off assistance. Okay, you have had a family tragedy and you go on welfare. We help you out. We give you a month or two to get yourself together, understandable. Then we start helping you find work. Oh, you have a kid? Okay, let’s see what we can do. Is there someone who should be paying child support? Let’s fix that. Can you do work from home, or is there a job we can help you get that has on site daycare? Can we pay daycare for a year, while you get to a point that you can pay for it yourself? Can we lower your monthly assistance payments a little at a time, so that you have not only enough money to pay rent, but can get appropriate clothing and transportation to your new job, so you don’t have to give it up and go back on the dole?
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There has to be a better way than it is right now. I have friends who are disabled. She has seizures, and her husband has other issues that limit his mobility in very severe ways. Both of them are completely mentally solid. They’re both educated. They WANT to work. They are basically told that if they get jobs, they’ll lose all disability, which includes the medicaid that keeps her seizures from putting her in hospital… but new jobs won’t give insurance right off the bat, and being on disability means they can’t get enough money together to buy meds to cover the middle ground. Etc etc etc. They’re forced to be idle, when they don’t want to be, and could be doing many things from home that would get them off… but the system is set to help the lowest common denominator, so they’re borked.
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Those who live off the charity of others, without the absolute need to do so, are scum. While I don’t think every single mom on welfare is a slut, I’ve personally met enough of them that have chosen to have several kids just to stay on welfare and not have to work, that I can’t ignore it’s a thing. And that bothers me. We should be better. Sigh.
Thanks, and I agree on all points. I, too, have friends and family who are disabled — bona fide disabilities, most of them — and they want to work and contribute and earn their keep. A lot of them do, with ADA-approved “reasonable accommodations”, and they do just fine. (One of the smartest men I know is almost totally blind and almost totally wheelchair-bound, and works an office job making more than I do. He could live on the dole with his disabilities, but he has the drive to do better for himself and his family.)
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If I were King of the World, I’d be re-working the welfare systems to have graduated tiers, reward people for taking steps to get off assistance, and slowly step down benefits over the course of six months to a year to ease the transition. I’d also not be rewarding single moms having more kids while on assistance, or kicking out good fathers because programs require “estranged” partners to qualify. (I’ve seen that one in real life, way too up close and personal for comfort.) The requirements are written by folks who mean well but fundamentally don’t understand people. One-size-fits-all, “all or nothing” approaches don’t serve anyone well and discourage transitioning off assistance.
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That needs to change if we’re to reduce dependence on public entitlement programs.
Or, they give to the United Way and just assume the actual delivery charities get the money, not realizing United Way takes their fees off the top for basically being a clearinghouse. Having 100% United Way participation during their fund drive was a big thing at my first job, enough senior management considered it a KPI.
I wasn’t interested and the pressure from my line manager was almost enough for me to go to HR for harassment. The ‘compromise’ was I signed up for the absolute minimum deduction and cancelled it after one pay check.
Wow, lots of comments here. I give to a number of different organizations, whether they’re “ charities” or not is maybe open to debate. But my favorite, because it’s small and personal, is Socks For Heroes. Look it up.
Did a look up of your Socks for Heroes place, and that’s AWESOME. Maybe I should do a round-up of *good* charities for the holidays. Ask everyone to toss one in the bucket.
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For me, my favorite local charity is Hannah Grimes Center. They offer help to people starting new businesses, not so much in money (though they can help with grants) but more in helping people learn how to RUN a business, how to do all the right things to make sure it’ll succeed instead of fail.
I like your approach to charity. So I for one, wouldn’t mind a list of Hagar approved charities.
Lots of good points here. One that I keep seeing is: actual charity involves giving things YOU own. Fake charity is giving things taken from others. It is that second type we see, at least part of the time, from the left. And they then use that to criticize others — not because those others don’t give, but because those others oppose taxing third parties for that supposed “charity”.
Use Catholics use the term ‘subsidiarity’ for what you are talking about. It’s best that help comes from the hearts and hands of those that know who you are and what kind of help you need. I find the charitable work I do to be heartwarming and rewarding. And like you, I’m not ‘shittin’ in linen’ (as my mom would say). But I give what I can of my time, talent, and treasure.
Far as the left donating, I’ve seen many, many non-profits spring up with the best intentions for helping people. But non profit doesn’t mean no profit. The excess is merely doled out in the form of bonuses to the fat cat virtue signal crowd at the top. Just in my little world of fixing their tech, I’ve seen the directors of those charities do unbelievably shitty things to their employees. Charity there, it appears, doesn’t start at ‘home’.
Recognition and thanks is nice and deserved bit I’ve Laos personally felt if you must tell absolutely everyone about how you give to charity, you motives are not completely charitable. I’m not accusing you of anything here Hagar.
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I have a couple of charities I support each year that are larger and more organized bit in which you can participate more directly than simply sending money into a black hole. One in particular is for mother and children who don’t have enough, there is a big amazon list you buy the actual things they currently need from.
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I also try to be charitable in my hobbies by paying it forward how I can. To help people just starting out with deals or hook someone up here and there. Again pretty much directly face to face.
Wow, this is probably the first thing I’ve read from you where I totally agree. The example from Christ and the Bible is personal charity, not corporate or govt charity. Giving one person to the next best way to give. We give thru our church and we also give to people we know. We volunteer on occasion, probably not as much as I should be still. Good write up.