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travisluis:

“There’s a very interesting book by Arthur Brooks, the new head of AEI—an economist, but a rather thoughtful economist—called Who Really Cares. Brooks points out that liberals, for all their profession of caring for other people, give much less to charity than do conservatives. He cites one finding that the city of San Francisco has about the same population as the state of North Dakota. But San Francisco is very liberal, very rich, compared to North Dakota, which is much poorer and more conservative. And North Dakota gives twice the amount to charities as San Francisco does in a year. Nor is this just a matter of money; it also applies to volunteer activity such as giving blood, which you don’t have to be very rich to do. So he begins to speculate—perhaps not carrying it far enough—that the reason is that liberals believe in justice and to them justice crowds out other virtues such as generosity or charity or Aristotelian virtue, or being Christian. And liberals criticize people who give, because it makes you feel too good; it gives you a warm glow and it makes you fond of yourself, as if you were worth more than the person to whom you’re giving. So it’s better and more equal and more egalitarian to make it all compulsory and take it away from the rich through taxes, rather than allowing them to exercise their voluntary choice of not giving their money to things that they personally don’t think worth doing. So I guess one thing conservatives can do is to emphasize other virtues besides justice, since justice in our democratic age seems to be understood as an egalitarian impulse.”

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The Point Magazine

The obvious explanation: If you take out contributions to religious organizations it’s about even - http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ezraklein_archive?month=12&year=2008&base_name=do_liberals_hate_charity

I’d be willing to bet that those who give to their church in one big donation each year are also more likely to take the donation as a deduction. IRS-reported deductions are all that these studies usually measure, and make up only an estimated 60-70% of charitable contributions. It is a lot easier to put in a deduction if you make one big contribution to a single organization (your church) than if you make many smaller contributions to organizations focused on specific problems.