The Spirit of Giving?

Arthur C. Brooks makes things up in his most recent op-ed from the WSJ ("Tea partiers and the spirit of giving" December 24, 2010).

He starts innocuously enough with a grand bland claim:
By now everyone knows that the dramatic November election was not an endorsement of Republicanism, but rather a rebellion against expansionist government and an attempt to re-establish America's culture of free enterprise.

By "expansionist" he does not mean the $3trillion war in Iraq and Afghanistan, unpaid for except by borrowing from foreign nations (and not through the shared sacrifice of taxes), nor does he mean the intrusive and civil-rights compromising government data-mining operation; these fall under 'national security,' and are apparently exempt from consideration of the size or reach of government.   Government has increased in size only if we consider the federal government (since states have shed public jobs at an arithmetically higher rate than the national government has added them) and only then if you we include the bulge of Census worker hiring.  Otherwise, the size of government has ebbed.  Yes, regulation has become more dense, though we can include the weak financial regulations bill and a general uptick in oversight departments actually demonstrating oversight (opposed to, for example, the lax and criminal malfeasance of the Bureau of Mining under Republic administration for the past decade).

To"re-establish America's culture of free enterprise" requires that America's culture of free enterprise has been disestablished.  When did that happen?  And what does that mean?  The only thing suffering free enterprise in this country is the corporate culture of down-sizing as means of profit, substituting temporary for full-time employment as a way of reducing benefits, off-sourcing jobs in order to lower labor costs and unwillingness of the banks (soluble only because tax-payers bailed them) to loan money to small businesses.  The middle class is disappearing, and free enterprise with them, a trend that begun under Reagon-omics and Thatcher and accelerated during the decade of Bush tax cuts following Clinton-era deregulated finance.

Brooks them starts playing with numbers, claiming that "nearly one-third of Americans ... classify themselves as "supporters" of the (Tea Party) movement, according to Gallup."  Supporters of what, exactly?  Brooks does not say, leaving the impression of some significant groundswell of those in concerted alignment with everything the Tea Party wants.  Looking at the numbers, though, it is difficult to figure out where Brooks earns his belief.  The most recent Gallup/USToday poll does indicate that 27% of respondents want the Tea Party standard bearers to set the policy agenda, as many as want the Obama White House to do so, and slightly more than want the GOP leaders and the Democrats to lead.  This is less than one-third of those who were polled; Gallup does not explain who they asked, so we have no idea about how to generalize these results.  Brooks, though, has no problem turning them into a concrete narrative.

I could be considered a supporter of Tea Party movement if asked whether Medicare should be eliminated (we'd both say "no"), if government should be less intrusive (as in protecting a robust 4th Amendment), or if the debt should be reduced (yes - though I would raise marginal rates and eliminate tax breaks).  Further, we would both agree to shrink the size of government - though I would 'support' this through a smaller military, reduction of agricultural subsidies and other forms of corporate welfare and larger role for local control of schooling.  My point is that Brooks dispenses with further explanation since further explanation would dilute his narrative.

With that false identity installed - of the 100+million Americas who stand against Obama America - he gets to his main point:
In fact, the millions of Americans who advocate for private entrepreneurship and limited government—whether they are rich or poor—may be stingy when it comes to giving away other people's money through state redistribution, but they are surprisingly generous when it comes to giving away their own money privately... (a small section on how Americans give more than the non-free enterprise Europeans and Chinese-Russian-others) When it comes to voluntarily spreading their own wealth around, a distinct "charity gap" opens up between Americans who are for and against government income leveling. Your intuition might tell you that people who favor government redistribution care most about the less fortunate and would give more to charity. Initially, this was my own assumption. But the data tell a different story.


Giving more money to charity means caring more about the less fortunate than giving less money to charity but preferring that the less fortunate are cared for in a sustainable, institutional and socially effective way?

He continues:
The most recent year that a large, nonpartisan survey asked people about both redistributive beliefs and charitable giving was 1996. That year, the General Social Survey (GSS) found that those who were against higher levels of government redistribution privately gave four times as much money, on average, as people who were in favor of redistribution. This is not all church-related giving; they also gave about 3.5 times as much to nonreligious causes. Anti-redistributionists gave more even after correcting for differences in income, age, religion and education.

First, what does 'government distribution' mean?  Social services?  Unemployment automatic adjustments?  Social security?  Public school?

Second, a clearer demographic picture of those 'against' and 'for' governmental redistribution is necessary.   Who are they?  What is their wealth?  What are their politics?

Third, average is a terrible statistic to use, since a few high contributors can skew the figures.

Fourth, focus on the omnibus last sentence modifier - "correcting for differences in income, age, religion and education."   What does Brooks mean by correcting for?

Finally, so what?  Immense donations to charity does not mean care more for the fortunate; it could just as easily demonstrate a higher concern for the tax subsidy.  And interest in having government, not the individual, play a leading role in redistribution could represent a logical and compassionate belief in sustained structural support as a more effective and efficient way of addressing chronic and debilitating inequality than sporadic, individualistic, tax-planned giving (dependent on yearly income and estate effects).

More:
The GSS in 2002 showed that those who said the government was "spending too much money on welfare" were more likely to donate blood than those who said the government was "spending too little money on welfare." The anti-redistributionists were also more likely to give someone directions on the street, return change mistakenly handed them by a cashier, and give food (or money) to a homeless person.

Here is the methodology of the GSS:
In-person interviews were conducted with a national, full probability sample of 2,765 English-speaking persons 18 years of age or over, living in non-institutional arrangements within the United States. Interviews were conducted during February, March, and April of 2002. The response rate was 70 percent. 

How different would social attitudes have been in 2002 than now?  What history has intervened between 2002 and now?  How representative would 1936 (70% of the 2765 sampled) randomly sampled people of the entire 300million US population in 2002, much less now?  What would the Tea Party have thought about the massive Medicare Part D vote taken by a Republican-dominated Congress and signed by President Bush in December of 2003?  Would they have preferred that individuals made private donations to drug companies on behave of the elderly instead?

Notice how Brooks turns these 1936 respondents into his "millions of Americans who advocate for private entrepreneurship and limited government"?  This is one way he does a lovely job of using what little data is available to him to create a mythic of Tea Party generosity:  The millions of Americans who believe in limited government give disproportionately to others. This is in addition to—not instead of—their defense of our free-enterprise system, which gives the most people the most opportunities to earn their own success.

Again, with the millions.

It may be that people who have a dim view of their taxes being raised to pay for the social welfare of others give more to private charity.   It also stands to reason that people who see inequality as a rising force shaping the American identity would prefer to use the levers of government to ameliorate the suffering and potentially eliminate its causes through a broad institutional approach.  There is no evidence, not least supplied by Brooks, that supports any of his reasoning behind the 'charity gap.'