On American Giving
Ah, the giving season – the best time of the year to be American. We’re the most charitable people on the planet, after all.
I learned this from John Stossel’s recent 20/20 report, “Are Americans Cheap?” Stossel explored the myths and facts about American charity and giving, and, as usual, his findings were mighty surprising.
Did you know, for instance, that the United States government gave out $20 billion in foreign aid in 2004? It sounds like a lot, but as a percentage of our wealth, we rank 21st out of the 22 major donor countries.
That statistic was enough to make Angelina Jolie go nuts. She’s the gorgeous actress who makes a lot of dough, and, to her credit, gives a lot of it away. She complained that, considering how rich America is, our government should give away more.
But the key word is “government.” Stossel decided to investigate how much individual Americans, all 300 million of us, give through private charities. What did he find? According to the Hudson Institute, individual Americans, through private charities, gave $24.2 billion in 2004.
Stossel cited the tsunami tragedy that struck Indonesia a few years ago. Whereas the U.S. government gave $900 million to relief efforts, individual Americans gave $2 billion in food, clothing and cash.
The fact is, when you combine government and private giving, America is the most generous country on earth. According to a professor Stossel interviewed, an expert on charitable giving, Americans give three and one-half times more, per capita, than the French, seven times more than the Germans and 14 times more than the Italians.
Though not all Americans are generous.
One might assume that the more liberal folks in America – folks who voice their concerns about the poor – would be more likely to donate to charitable causes, but that turns out to be a myth.
Stossel set up a Salvation Army bucket in two places: Sioux Falls, S.D. and San Francisco, Calif. San Francisco has a lot more dough and a lot of people who classify themselves as politically liberal; only 14 percent of the people who live there attend church. Sioux Falls is a rural, middle-class community in which half the folks are church goers.
So which city gave more? The Sioux Falls folks won hands down. Stossel pointed out that the simple reason why is that liberal folks tend to believe the government should take care of the poor, whereas more religious folks tend to be big believers in giving their own time and money to help a variety of charitable causes.
Stossel found, in fact, that almost all the people who donated to the Salvation Army in Sioux Falls were churchgoers. And that church goers are four times more likely to give to charity than those who are not.
Another interesting finding was that the people who give the most, as a percentage of their wealth, aren’t the richest Americans or even middle class Americans – they’re the folks on the lower end of the economic scale. They give almost 30 percent more of their income than anybody else.
In any event, the facts are what they are. Americans are a generous people. And we’re a generous people for a lot of reasons, but the chief one, in my humble opinion, is that our civilization was formed around Judeo-Christian values – values that include kindness and compassion and charity.
And it’s also worth noting that in a lot of places – Western Europe and many big cities in America, for instance – such simple values are being snuffed out by more secular ones. And secular values tend to favor government charity and giving over the private kind. You got to wonder how charitable we’ll be in another 50 years.
But for the moment it does the heart good to know how charitable America is. It’s good to know that during the holiday season, especially, we’ll be giving out billions to causes and charities of every kind.
As I said, it’s the best time of the year to be American. We’re the most generous people on the planet, after all.
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December 5th, 2006 at 4:45 am
Thank you.
I’ve wanted to know the answer to that question ever since the America haters started touting the “fact” that America gives less in foreign aid than anyone else.
It’s nice to know that my theory (that Americans, having a lighter tax burden than other nations, would not only be able to give more but would be less likely to see charity as an act of the state rather than an act of the individual) is accurate.