Christmas Notes
Post
22/12/06, Margaret Wente, Go ahead, make my Christmas, (Source).
23/12/06, Rex Murphy, The last spasm of Humbugitis, (Source).
27/12/06, Neil Reynolds, The most giving nation? It's not us, (Source).
22/12/06, Margaret Wente, Go ahead, make my Christmas, (Back).
Every year around this time, we have a little moral panic when some idiot bans Christmas trees. In my house, we avoid this problem by referring to it as a Hanukkah bush. But it's not the politically sensitive crowd that's wrecking Christmas. It's the ubiquitous health and safety nannies. According to them, the Christmas season is a minefield of physical and emotional hazards. It is by far the most dangerous time of the year. In fact, it's amazing that any of us survives it.
In Britain, many offices have banned Christmas decorations — not for fear of giving offence but for health and safety reasons. Tinsel is a fire hazard. The lights could short out. Someone might get hurt, and they might sue, and the liability insurance premiums would go up. Having spent a bit of time recently in England, I can tell you that nobody is more safety conscious than the British. One town abandoned a ceremony to turn on the Christmas lights (there was even going to be a star from Coronation Street to flick the switch) because authorities were afraid that too many people might show up and that someone might get trampled.
Another town decided to cancel the traditional outdoor trees and decorations because (according to The Independent) the district council insisted on a risk assessment performed by qualified contractors. The cost of the risk assessment was prohibitive, and so that was that. I won't even mention the problem with the pantomime (a seasonal form of comic theatre that typically offers local people dressing up and behaving goofily). One town warned the players that they could no longer throw hard candies into the audience, because a child might be injured.
In Canada, we are obsessed with the risks not of injury but of excess. The newspapers and TV shows are filled with advice from doctors, dietitians, psychologists and public-health nannies warning us about the grave dangers of overindulgence. Don't they know Christmas is when you're supposed to eat too much? Historically, it was your last chance to pig out and party before you settled into a long winter of gnawing on shrivelled root vegetables and hardtack. But no. Not one morsel of turkey skin will grease their pursed and righteous lips.
As for you, wretched sinner, they have a mountain of fatuous and patronizing instructions, all of which are excruciatingly self-evident to any sentient seven-year-old. Eat small portions! Raw carrots are better than plum pudding with hard sauce! Lay off the shortbread cookies! People actually get air time to say these things.
As for alcohol, times have changed. We're all practically teetotallers now. I can scarcely remember the last time someone got overly refreshed at an office party and began behaving badly. Unfortunately, I guess everyone has read the fatuous advice columns that run every year about the pitfalls and perils of the office party: Don't get drunk and make a pass at the boss's wife! Whew. Aren't you glad we have experts?
The only point of office parties is the hope that someone will misbehave and provide fodder for amusing reminiscences. Lately, no such luck. And in case you happen to slip up and actually drink a glass of wine, fear not. Someone will hand you a taxi voucher on your way out the door. Liability issues, I guess.
Somewhere, there must be people who make a living dreaming up new Christmas scares. Do your children have Santa-phobia? Here's what to do about it. On the other hand, maybe Santa-phobia is a good thing. There's something creepy about a guy who wants to dress up in a red suit and a fake beard and entice little children to sit on his lap. Who knows what he's really doing up there? If your kid insists on seeing Santa, better make her keep her distance. Tell her that her body belongs to her. So no touching!
Then we have the dangers of consumer overspending and debt. Basically, we just don't know how to control ourselves. We wander into Costco for some underwear and discount cat food and see that $1,999 wide-screen LCD TV and, wham, we're in overdraft.
Overspending, of course, is not just a consumer credit issue. It is a spiritual and moral issue. We buy that wide-screen TV to fill a spiritual void in our empty lives. We think that mindless materialism will make up for our lack of meaning and purpose and intimate connection with the people we're supposed to love. Well, I'm here to tell you it won't. On the other hand, $1,999 isn't such a bad price.
But the worst part of Christmas is the emotional chaos it wreaks. Depressives get more depressed, manics get more manic, and shaky relationships become thoroughly unhinged. God (or the deity of your preference) help anyone who has to navigate the rocky shoals of competing family obligations, simmering marital tensions, and difficult in-laws.
Christmas is always a bracing reminder of why you only get together with certain people once a year. It is also an object lesson in the randomness of genetics, when you discover yet again that it's possible to share your chromosomes and looks with people with whom you have absolutely nothing else in common. Once you realize that everyone else has more or less the same experience, it gets easier to bear.
It also helps if you have a drink. Oh, go ahead. Have two. Have an extra piece of fruitcake. Have some chocolate-covered almonds. Kick back and watch a game on your new wide-screen TV. Have some popcorn with real butter. To hell with all that so-called good advice.
Christmas comes but once a year. You might as well enjoy it.
23/12/06, Rex Murphy, The last spasm of Humbugitis, (Back).
Good news, if not exactly tidings of joy.
This Christmas, we have had, mercifully, very few manifestations of "acute Christmas cultural sensitivity syndrome," or, in layman's lingo, Humbugitis. I refer to the annual combat over whether Christmas trees may be called Christmas trees, Christmas carols may be sung at school concerts -- the whole tired, politically correct shtick.
This plague of mean-spiritedness and tight bowels, hoisted under the pious flag of "inclusion" and powered by very high doses of self-righteousness and downright Scroogery, has passed its apogee, and is now in decline and remission.
It was a strange and singular ailment. With most disorders, it is the person afflicted who has, alas, to bear the suffering. If I get a flu, you don't cough. If you are allergic to cats or peanuts or Paris Hilton, I don't, respectively, get a rash, fall ill, or expand like a blowfish on exposure to these vile triggers.
Nature has a wonderful economy in these matters. If She targets "A" with some bug or gene designed to bring on night sweats, or fevers, or cramps or whooping cough (or if She's in a holiday mood and has a sale on, sending out all four) then "A," and "A" alone, is in for one rough time.
Not so with Humbugitis. When this canker hits, the Humbugee feels a brittle joy, but everyone else is miserable.
Let me illustrate. If some priggish person, say a judge, has developed an advanced case of cultural allergy, and breaks out in metaphysical spots at the sight of a three-foot pine covered with tinsel and lights in a -- and I know this stretches the imagination -- courthouse here in Toronto the Festive, and then to rid herself of her Yuletide panics, orders the tree to a corner of the courthouse, who bears the pain?
Why every other person, jaywalker or criminal, bail bondsman or lawyer, to whom the tree was a green cheer for a hectic moment. There's Johnny, going in to pay his 15th speeding ticket. He may even face time, or worse -- community service. But, hark! What's this? Why the little scofflaw is humming Good King Wenceslas. It's a rap version, of course, and sounds vaguely menacing, but what the hell: It's Christmas. Do our eyes deceive us, or is that the judge -- the fellow in the Santa cap on the bench -- humming along? For an instant, the courthouse is a page out of Dickens, compliments of the Highway Traffic Act.
However, poke the tree in some obscure corner. Irony of ironies, hide it behind frosted glass (what would Frosty the Snowperson think!), remove it from the crush of plaintiffs and lawyers, weeping relatives and pale-faced recidivists -- hide its sweet presence from the calming gaze of the court's "clients" and what results? This could be any old court in any old month, just a market of misery and contention, a bag of deceit under oath, thin hopes, transparent tactics, droning lawyers and bored judges.
Meanwhile, a Christmas tree in the lobby, and a few bars of Johnny Mathis or Bing Crosby executing I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas over the public address system and the whole scene changes. The brute in the leather jacket there, the Hell's Angels guy, he's remembering his first Harley. Let's not get maudlin here -- he stole it. And yet, everyone has their own best Christmas memory. He sees the court house tree, smells the pine needles and counts the icicles, and a tear rolls down his purloining cheek. He recalls that Christmas Eve (he was just a "juvie" then) when he hijacked the Harley.
But subtract the tree, issue some grim injunction to get rid of it, mutter some sociological jumbo about "inclusiveness" and "the Other" (who is this ubiquitous capitalized stranger, and why is he so damn fragile?) as rationalization, and who feels the pain?
Not the judge. She is, under some pinched, tight-lipped, grapefruit version of the term -- happy. She has sent a waft of politically correct incense up to the gods of Self-Conscious Diversity and the lesser deities of Cultural Sensitivity Training.
Everyone else? The kid who's there waiting to see if daddy's going to get bail this time, he's just lost a piece of our common delight. The rushed lawyers don't get a moment's sparkle as they rush from the lobby to the courtroom. The judges don't receive that flash of reminder when they look at the tree that this is, primarily, a season of mercy and goodwill. And of all our institutions, surely a courthouse is the place where reminders or mercy and goodwill are most needful.
But I think we've seen just about the last spasm of Humbugitis. The judge and the courthouse tree have made the whole business just too ridiculous. Even as an illness, it's become too embarrassing.
So, unqualifiedly, to All and that Other guy, too, Merry Christmas.
27/12/06, Neil Reynolds, The most giving nation? It's not us, (Back).
OTTAWA — Canadians like to think that they are an exceptionally giving and compassionate people -- especially when compared with Americans. Alas, along with the rest of the world, we are not. Americans donate more than twice as much as Canadians -- in money and time -- to charitable causes. They give $900 (U.S.) per person. We give $400 (Canadian) per person (Quebeckers give $175, the least of any province or territory -- 0.6 per cent of average household incomes).
Americans give 3.5 per cent. In Arkansas, one of the poorest of the American states, they give 3.9 per cent. Americans are, person for person, the most giving people on Earth. In his provocative book on charitable giving in America, Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism, charity-sleuth economist Arthur C. Brooks says U.S. voluntary donations now exceed $250-billion (U.S.) a year -- more than a trillion dollars in each four-year, presidential span. Seventy-five per cent of these donations are made by families; 25 per cent by corporations, foundations and bequests.
Mr. Brooks, a professor of public administration at Syracuse University, observes that the American's charitable donations are "more than enough to fund the entire annual gross domestic product of Sweden, Norway or Denmark." And they are growing at a faster rate than either per-capita income or household income.
The easy explanation for Canadian and European stinginess, advanced by people who prefer to define Americans as congenitally selfish, is that we who are truly generous direct our charitable donations to the government, which then passes them along to people in need. Halifax writer Laura Penny put precisely this spin on it in Saturday's Globe and Mail: "For us and our continental friends, the prevailing ethos is that systemic problems require public solutions, such as progressive taxation or a social safety net." Note the implicit assertion, quite false, that Americans do not practise progressive taxation and do not provide safety nets. In fact, of course, they do.
As Mr. Brooks notes, the average tax burden in all European countries, as a percentage of household income, is not actually any higher than it is in the U.S. The average British family, for example, pays 10.8 per cent of its income to the government; the average American family pays 11.3 per cent. And U.S. economist Alan Reynolds has calculated that Americans, as taxpayers, provide $120,000 a year -- on average -- for every family of four officially designated as "poor." (He bases this number on his calculation that at least a 12th of U.S. federal taxes are spent on safety net programs for poor families.) Mr. Brooks did find that some Americans were much more generous than others -- 225 million Americans donate money every year and 75 million Americans never donate. Who gives and who doesn't? Essentially, religious people give and non-religious people don't -- whatever their politics. People who describe themselves as secular give the least. The single factor that signals charitable giving, "dwarfing all others," is religious faith.
People who are conservative and religious, the most generous people of all, predictably donate to the churches or synagogues to which they belong. But they give more than any other class of people to other kinds of charity as well. They donate more to the arts than liberals who have a strong religious faith. They donate more to the arts than liberals with no religious faith.
They donate more to the poor than all these other people. They donate more to international relief. And they donate more than they claim on their tax returns. Indeed, they generally claim only 20 per cent of the deductions to which they are entitled.
And, as a percentage of household income, working-class conservatives who are religious are the most generous Americans of all. As a percentage of their household incomes, they donate more than affluent families and, indeed, more than the rich. These are, in part, the working poor, families with earned incomes as low as $14,000 a year. In contrast, welfare families with exactly the same income do not contribute to charities whether they regard themselves as religious or not.
Statistically, Mr. Brooks says, people who are conservative and religious donate 3.5 times as much as others (on average, $2,210 versus $642). On this character information alone, he says, you could precisely chart the political inclination -- the red states and the blue states -- of Americans in the past two elections.
Americans donate to international causes, on a per-capita basis, far in excess of people in any other country. No European country comes close.
Adjusted for different levels of incomes, Americans donate three times as much as the French, five times as much as Germans and 10 times as much as Italians. But then Europeans are notorious cheapskates. Tanzanians give more of their incomes to charity than Norwegians. Kenyans give more than Austrians and Germans. South Africans give more than Italians.
Canadians can argue, if they so wish, that they give at Canada Revenue. This is nonsense. Taxes have a job to do. Charity, a voluntary action, has a different task.
It is because of this difference that the Apostle Paul did not say: "Now abideth faith, hope and taxes, and the greatest of these in taxes."
(Back)
23/12/06, Rex Murphy, The last spasm of Humbugitis, (Source).
27/12/06, Neil Reynolds, The most giving nation? It's not us, (Source).
22/12/06, Margaret Wente, Go ahead, make my Christmas, (Back).
Every year around this time, we have a little moral panic when some idiot bans Christmas trees. In my house, we avoid this problem by referring to it as a Hanukkah bush. But it's not the politically sensitive crowd that's wrecking Christmas. It's the ubiquitous health and safety nannies. According to them, the Christmas season is a minefield of physical and emotional hazards. It is by far the most dangerous time of the year. In fact, it's amazing that any of us survives it.
In Britain, many offices have banned Christmas decorations — not for fear of giving offence but for health and safety reasons. Tinsel is a fire hazard. The lights could short out. Someone might get hurt, and they might sue, and the liability insurance premiums would go up. Having spent a bit of time recently in England, I can tell you that nobody is more safety conscious than the British. One town abandoned a ceremony to turn on the Christmas lights (there was even going to be a star from Coronation Street to flick the switch) because authorities were afraid that too many people might show up and that someone might get trampled.
Another town decided to cancel the traditional outdoor trees and decorations because (according to The Independent) the district council insisted on a risk assessment performed by qualified contractors. The cost of the risk assessment was prohibitive, and so that was that. I won't even mention the problem with the pantomime (a seasonal form of comic theatre that typically offers local people dressing up and behaving goofily). One town warned the players that they could no longer throw hard candies into the audience, because a child might be injured.
In Canada, we are obsessed with the risks not of injury but of excess. The newspapers and TV shows are filled with advice from doctors, dietitians, psychologists and public-health nannies warning us about the grave dangers of overindulgence. Don't they know Christmas is when you're supposed to eat too much? Historically, it was your last chance to pig out and party before you settled into a long winter of gnawing on shrivelled root vegetables and hardtack. But no. Not one morsel of turkey skin will grease their pursed and righteous lips.
As for you, wretched sinner, they have a mountain of fatuous and patronizing instructions, all of which are excruciatingly self-evident to any sentient seven-year-old. Eat small portions! Raw carrots are better than plum pudding with hard sauce! Lay off the shortbread cookies! People actually get air time to say these things.
As for alcohol, times have changed. We're all practically teetotallers now. I can scarcely remember the last time someone got overly refreshed at an office party and began behaving badly. Unfortunately, I guess everyone has read the fatuous advice columns that run every year about the pitfalls and perils of the office party: Don't get drunk and make a pass at the boss's wife! Whew. Aren't you glad we have experts?
The only point of office parties is the hope that someone will misbehave and provide fodder for amusing reminiscences. Lately, no such luck. And in case you happen to slip up and actually drink a glass of wine, fear not. Someone will hand you a taxi voucher on your way out the door. Liability issues, I guess.
Somewhere, there must be people who make a living dreaming up new Christmas scares. Do your children have Santa-phobia? Here's what to do about it. On the other hand, maybe Santa-phobia is a good thing. There's something creepy about a guy who wants to dress up in a red suit and a fake beard and entice little children to sit on his lap. Who knows what he's really doing up there? If your kid insists on seeing Santa, better make her keep her distance. Tell her that her body belongs to her. So no touching!
Then we have the dangers of consumer overspending and debt. Basically, we just don't know how to control ourselves. We wander into Costco for some underwear and discount cat food and see that $1,999 wide-screen LCD TV and, wham, we're in overdraft.
Overspending, of course, is not just a consumer credit issue. It is a spiritual and moral issue. We buy that wide-screen TV to fill a spiritual void in our empty lives. We think that mindless materialism will make up for our lack of meaning and purpose and intimate connection with the people we're supposed to love. Well, I'm here to tell you it won't. On the other hand, $1,999 isn't such a bad price.
But the worst part of Christmas is the emotional chaos it wreaks. Depressives get more depressed, manics get more manic, and shaky relationships become thoroughly unhinged. God (or the deity of your preference) help anyone who has to navigate the rocky shoals of competing family obligations, simmering marital tensions, and difficult in-laws.
Christmas is always a bracing reminder of why you only get together with certain people once a year. It is also an object lesson in the randomness of genetics, when you discover yet again that it's possible to share your chromosomes and looks with people with whom you have absolutely nothing else in common. Once you realize that everyone else has more or less the same experience, it gets easier to bear.
It also helps if you have a drink. Oh, go ahead. Have two. Have an extra piece of fruitcake. Have some chocolate-covered almonds. Kick back and watch a game on your new wide-screen TV. Have some popcorn with real butter. To hell with all that so-called good advice.
Christmas comes but once a year. You might as well enjoy it.
23/12/06, Rex Murphy, The last spasm of Humbugitis, (Back).
Good news, if not exactly tidings of joy.
This Christmas, we have had, mercifully, very few manifestations of "acute Christmas cultural sensitivity syndrome," or, in layman's lingo, Humbugitis. I refer to the annual combat over whether Christmas trees may be called Christmas trees, Christmas carols may be sung at school concerts -- the whole tired, politically correct shtick.
This plague of mean-spiritedness and tight bowels, hoisted under the pious flag of "inclusion" and powered by very high doses of self-righteousness and downright Scroogery, has passed its apogee, and is now in decline and remission.
It was a strange and singular ailment. With most disorders, it is the person afflicted who has, alas, to bear the suffering. If I get a flu, you don't cough. If you are allergic to cats or peanuts or Paris Hilton, I don't, respectively, get a rash, fall ill, or expand like a blowfish on exposure to these vile triggers.
Nature has a wonderful economy in these matters. If She targets "A" with some bug or gene designed to bring on night sweats, or fevers, or cramps or whooping cough (or if She's in a holiday mood and has a sale on, sending out all four) then "A," and "A" alone, is in for one rough time.
Not so with Humbugitis. When this canker hits, the Humbugee feels a brittle joy, but everyone else is miserable.
Let me illustrate. If some priggish person, say a judge, has developed an advanced case of cultural allergy, and breaks out in metaphysical spots at the sight of a three-foot pine covered with tinsel and lights in a -- and I know this stretches the imagination -- courthouse here in Toronto the Festive, and then to rid herself of her Yuletide panics, orders the tree to a corner of the courthouse, who bears the pain?
Why every other person, jaywalker or criminal, bail bondsman or lawyer, to whom the tree was a green cheer for a hectic moment. There's Johnny, going in to pay his 15th speeding ticket. He may even face time, or worse -- community service. But, hark! What's this? Why the little scofflaw is humming Good King Wenceslas. It's a rap version, of course, and sounds vaguely menacing, but what the hell: It's Christmas. Do our eyes deceive us, or is that the judge -- the fellow in the Santa cap on the bench -- humming along? For an instant, the courthouse is a page out of Dickens, compliments of the Highway Traffic Act.
However, poke the tree in some obscure corner. Irony of ironies, hide it behind frosted glass (what would Frosty the Snowperson think!), remove it from the crush of plaintiffs and lawyers, weeping relatives and pale-faced recidivists -- hide its sweet presence from the calming gaze of the court's "clients" and what results? This could be any old court in any old month, just a market of misery and contention, a bag of deceit under oath, thin hopes, transparent tactics, droning lawyers and bored judges.
Meanwhile, a Christmas tree in the lobby, and a few bars of Johnny Mathis or Bing Crosby executing I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas over the public address system and the whole scene changes. The brute in the leather jacket there, the Hell's Angels guy, he's remembering his first Harley. Let's not get maudlin here -- he stole it. And yet, everyone has their own best Christmas memory. He sees the court house tree, smells the pine needles and counts the icicles, and a tear rolls down his purloining cheek. He recalls that Christmas Eve (he was just a "juvie" then) when he hijacked the Harley.
But subtract the tree, issue some grim injunction to get rid of it, mutter some sociological jumbo about "inclusiveness" and "the Other" (who is this ubiquitous capitalized stranger, and why is he so damn fragile?) as rationalization, and who feels the pain?
Not the judge. She is, under some pinched, tight-lipped, grapefruit version of the term -- happy. She has sent a waft of politically correct incense up to the gods of Self-Conscious Diversity and the lesser deities of Cultural Sensitivity Training.
Everyone else? The kid who's there waiting to see if daddy's going to get bail this time, he's just lost a piece of our common delight. The rushed lawyers don't get a moment's sparkle as they rush from the lobby to the courtroom. The judges don't receive that flash of reminder when they look at the tree that this is, primarily, a season of mercy and goodwill. And of all our institutions, surely a courthouse is the place where reminders or mercy and goodwill are most needful.
But I think we've seen just about the last spasm of Humbugitis. The judge and the courthouse tree have made the whole business just too ridiculous. Even as an illness, it's become too embarrassing.
So, unqualifiedly, to All and that Other guy, too, Merry Christmas.
27/12/06, Neil Reynolds, The most giving nation? It's not us, (Back).
OTTAWA — Canadians like to think that they are an exceptionally giving and compassionate people -- especially when compared with Americans. Alas, along with the rest of the world, we are not. Americans donate more than twice as much as Canadians -- in money and time -- to charitable causes. They give $900 (U.S.) per person. We give $400 (Canadian) per person (Quebeckers give $175, the least of any province or territory -- 0.6 per cent of average household incomes).
Americans give 3.5 per cent. In Arkansas, one of the poorest of the American states, they give 3.9 per cent. Americans are, person for person, the most giving people on Earth. In his provocative book on charitable giving in America, Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism, charity-sleuth economist Arthur C. Brooks says U.S. voluntary donations now exceed $250-billion (U.S.) a year -- more than a trillion dollars in each four-year, presidential span. Seventy-five per cent of these donations are made by families; 25 per cent by corporations, foundations and bequests.
Mr. Brooks, a professor of public administration at Syracuse University, observes that the American's charitable donations are "more than enough to fund the entire annual gross domestic product of Sweden, Norway or Denmark." And they are growing at a faster rate than either per-capita income or household income.
The easy explanation for Canadian and European stinginess, advanced by people who prefer to define Americans as congenitally selfish, is that we who are truly generous direct our charitable donations to the government, which then passes them along to people in need. Halifax writer Laura Penny put precisely this spin on it in Saturday's Globe and Mail: "For us and our continental friends, the prevailing ethos is that systemic problems require public solutions, such as progressive taxation or a social safety net." Note the implicit assertion, quite false, that Americans do not practise progressive taxation and do not provide safety nets. In fact, of course, they do.
As Mr. Brooks notes, the average tax burden in all European countries, as a percentage of household income, is not actually any higher than it is in the U.S. The average British family, for example, pays 10.8 per cent of its income to the government; the average American family pays 11.3 per cent. And U.S. economist Alan Reynolds has calculated that Americans, as taxpayers, provide $120,000 a year -- on average -- for every family of four officially designated as "poor." (He bases this number on his calculation that at least a 12th of U.S. federal taxes are spent on safety net programs for poor families.) Mr. Brooks did find that some Americans were much more generous than others -- 225 million Americans donate money every year and 75 million Americans never donate. Who gives and who doesn't? Essentially, religious people give and non-religious people don't -- whatever their politics. People who describe themselves as secular give the least. The single factor that signals charitable giving, "dwarfing all others," is religious faith.
People who are conservative and religious, the most generous people of all, predictably donate to the churches or synagogues to which they belong. But they give more than any other class of people to other kinds of charity as well. They donate more to the arts than liberals who have a strong religious faith. They donate more to the arts than liberals with no religious faith.
They donate more to the poor than all these other people. They donate more to international relief. And they donate more than they claim on their tax returns. Indeed, they generally claim only 20 per cent of the deductions to which they are entitled.
And, as a percentage of household income, working-class conservatives who are religious are the most generous Americans of all. As a percentage of their household incomes, they donate more than affluent families and, indeed, more than the rich. These are, in part, the working poor, families with earned incomes as low as $14,000 a year. In contrast, welfare families with exactly the same income do not contribute to charities whether they regard themselves as religious or not.
Statistically, Mr. Brooks says, people who are conservative and religious donate 3.5 times as much as others (on average, $2,210 versus $642). On this character information alone, he says, you could precisely chart the political inclination -- the red states and the blue states -- of Americans in the past two elections.
Americans donate to international causes, on a per-capita basis, far in excess of people in any other country. No European country comes close.
Adjusted for different levels of incomes, Americans donate three times as much as the French, five times as much as Germans and 10 times as much as Italians. But then Europeans are notorious cheapskates. Tanzanians give more of their incomes to charity than Norwegians. Kenyans give more than Austrians and Germans. South Africans give more than Italians.
Canadians can argue, if they so wish, that they give at Canada Revenue. This is nonsense. Taxes have a job to do. Charity, a voluntary action, has a different task.
It is because of this difference that the Apostle Paul did not say: "Now abideth faith, hope and taxes, and the greatest of these in taxes."
(Back)
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