Tuesday, October 26, 2010

What Arthur knows...

As we are currently inundated by political ads, one can only hope that thinking people are realizing they can't all be telling the truth.  One of  the elementary principles of logic is antithesis:  A is not Non A.

One of the things someone is not telling the truth about is:  Who cares the most for the economic needs of the nation?  One side says "We show we care by fighting to give you your money back."  The other side says "We show we care by taking more money away...from the evil (implied) people who have "enough" and giving it to you (assuming every listener is more deserving than the person who nows has it)."

Granted that this is my biased interpretation of things, one can nevertheless see the screaming errors in logic in the second statement.

Arhtur Brooks (pictured above)  author of World's "Book of the Year," The Battle: How the Fight between Free Enterprise and Big Government will Shape America's Future wrote an earlier volume entitled Who Really Cares:  The Surprising Truth about Compassionate Conservatism.   Here are some interesting statistics from that book:

  • Ninety-one percent of people who identify themselves as religious are likely to give to charity, writes Brooks, as opposed to 66 percent of people who do not.
  • The religious giving sector is just as likely to give to secular programs as it is to religious causes.
  • Those who think government should do more to redistribute income are less likely to give to charitable causes, and those who believe the government has less of a role to play in income redistribution tend to give more.
  • People who couple and raise children are more likely to give philanthropically than those who do not. The more children there are in a family, the more likely that a family will donate to charity.
  • One of Brooks's most controversial findings was that political conservatives give more, despite having incomes that are on average 6 percent lower than liberals.

Just thought you would enjoy some data to balance with all the rhetoric flying around...

1 comment:

  1. I think the problem is that people lack basic reasoning skills. Simple problems seem to confuse most people. When did teaching logic become taboo? Or are simple sheep easier to herd?

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