Too Charitable to Obama?
When I wrote “Giving Obama His Due,” I based by story on this year’s income tax return.
A Tuesday story entitled, “For Obama, charity really began in the U.S. Senate,” by the Chicago Tribune’s Bob Secter today makes it clear that I may have offered too much credit.
Secter looked at income tax forms for both U.S. Senator Dick Durbin and Barack (note that I spelled it correctly this time without being reminded) Obama going back to 1997.
Obama’s contributions in 1997 appear to be a bit less than 1% of income, with $400 to his church. Durbin’s were a bit below 2%. Secter notes the national average is 2.2%.
The Biblical admonition is a minimum of 10%, the tithe.
Both politicians had increased their contributions to about 4½% by 2005.
Obama, as I calculated earlier, gave 6.1% to charities last year. Secter does note that Obama contributed just 4/10ths of one percent of his income--$1,050 as recently as 2002.
The recent ramp-up lets Obama avoid the 1998 ridicule of ridicule of Al Gore for contributing only $353.
Secter reports that Obama’s church, Trinity United Church of Christ “encourages its members to donate 10 percent of their income…from 1997 through 2002, the Obamas reported devoting less than 1 percent of their household income to charity.”
While reporting the contributions and total income of President George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, the Tribune article left the calculations to the reader. Cheney was at 6.5%, while Bush gave 10.2%.
McHenry County Blog reported the 10.2% figure in a story comparing Bush’s percentage with Mayor Richard Daley’s.
More, of course, at McHenry County Blog.
3 comments:
I am more concerned about the Obama-Rezko-slumlord connection in the Tim Novak of the Sun Times articles than who or how much he gives to charity.
Obama is a good politician. Trying to make him into a god is what hurt him.
Also, the slumlord financed by the city and government loans forgiven is crazy. Obama knew some of this and he was too wrapped up as was Daley.
This was exploitation of ignorant, low income Black people. Not some community service non for profit dream or lie.
Rezko should be in jail. Rezko is also represented by Larry Suffredin Cook County Commissioner's firm Shefsky and Brian Hynes politically connected sleazy lobbyist with Victor Reyes.
"This was exploitation of ignorant, low income Black people" doesn't ring true.
It is exploitation of powerless taxpayers when the State is sponsoring a swindle. From the Senator on down to the Alderman, the fix is in.
I'm not sure I can fault anybody for giving gingerly to charity. There is huge corruption and waste in the charity industry, beginning with outsized CEO salaries and lush perks like cars and free apartments and first class airfare for charity CEO's and their staffs. Because of this, I would never give money, say, to the United Way. Nor would I give it
to most churches.
I'm concerned because Obama just doesn't seem very smart. An ambitious pol from the get go but he didn't think to look into what Rezko and that law firm were doing to earn their bucks. It wouldn't have taken more than an hour to drive over to one of those apartment buildings and talk to the tenants. And Obama claims to have been a community organizer. He must have known a lot about real estate fraud on the poor and the dumb across Chicagoland.
And now, in the debate, we learn that he doesn't have a very clear idea about how he would deal with another terrorist attack but that he would probably check with other countries about what to do. This is reminiscent of John Kerry. Who, exactly, would Obama ask? The European Parliament? Russia? the Saudis? Like they have our best interests in mind.
He's not ready for prime time.
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