Ana

Profile

Username:
anacoana
Name:
Ana
Location:
Pima, AZ
Birthday:
01/05
Status:
Married
Job / Career:
Other

Stats

Post Reads:
478,022
Posts:
2425
Last Online:
> 30 days ago
View All »

My Friends

1 day ago
> 30 days ago
> 30 days ago
> 30 days ago
> 30 days ago
> 30 days ago
> 30 days ago
> 30 days ago

Subscribe

Inspirational Thoughts

Life & Events > America's Poor Are Its Most Generous
 

America's Poor Are Its Most Generous










WASHINGTON
— When Jody Richards saw a homeless man begging outside a downtown
McDonald's recently, he bought the man a cheeseburger. There's nothing
unusual about that, except that Richards is homeless, too, and the
99-cent cheeseburger was an outsized chunk of the $9.50 he'd earned
that day from panhandling.

The
generosity of poor people isn't so much rare as rarely noticed,
however.
America's poor are its most generous In fact, America's poor donate more, in percentage terms, than
higher-income groups do, surveys of charitable giving show. What's
more, their generosity declines less in hard times than the generosity
of richer givers does.



Virginia
Hodgkinson, former vice president for research at Independent Sector, a
Washington-based association of major nonprofit agencies reports that
...

"The lowest-income fifth (of the population) always give at more than their capacity ...

The next two-fifths give at capacity ...

And those in the highest-income two-fifths ARE CAPABLE OF GIVING TWO TO THREE TIMES MORE THAN THEY ACTUALLY GIVE."


Indeed, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' latest survey of consumer expenditure found that ...

The
poorest fifth of America's households contributed an average of 4.3
percent of their incomes to charitable organizations in 2007.


The richest fifth gave at less than half that rate, 2.1 percent.

Fifty-eight percent of noncontributors with ABOVE-MEDIAN INCOMES say they don't have enough money to give ANY away.



The
figures probably undercount remittances by legal and illegal immigrants
to family and friends back home, a multibillion-dollar outlay to which
the poor contribute disproportionally. None of the middle fifths of
America's households, in contrast, gave away as much as 3 percent of
their incomes. "As a rule, people who have money don't know people in
need," saId Tanya Davis, 40, a laid-off security guard and single
mother.

Certainly, better-off
people aren't hit up by friends and kin as often as Davis said she was,
having earned a reputation for generosity while she was working. Now
getting by on $110 a week in unemployment --- and $314 a month in
welfare, Davis still fields two or three appeals a week, she said, and
lays out $5 or $10 weekly. To explain her giving, Davis offered the two
reasons most commonly heard in three days of conversations with
low-income donors: "I believe that the more I give, the more I receive,
and that God loves a cheerful giver," Davis said. "Plus I've been in
their position, and someday I might be again." Herbert Smith, 31, a
Seventh-day Adventist who said he tithed his $1,010 monthly disability
check — giving away 10 percent of it — thought that poor people give
more because, in some ways, they worry less about their money. "We're
not scared of poverty the way rich people are," he said. "We know how
to get the lights back on when we can'tpay the electric bill."


In
terms of income, the poorest fifth seem unlikely benefactors. Their
pretax household incomes averaged $10,531 in 2007, according to the BLS
survey, compared with $158,388 for the top fifth. In addition, its
members are the least educated fifth of the U.S. population, the
oldest, the most religious and the likeliest to rent their homes,
according to demographers. They're also the most likely fifth to be on
welfare, to drive used cars or rely on public transportation, to be
students, minorities, women and recent immigrants.

However,
many of these characteristics predict generosity. Women are more
generous than men, studies have shown. Older people give more than
younger donors with equal incomes. The working poor, disproportionate
numbers of which are recent immigrants, are America's most generous
group, according to Arthur Brooks, the author of the book "Who Really
Cares," an analysis of U.S. generosity.


Faith probably
matters most, Brooks — who's the president of the American Enterprise
Institute, a conservative Washington policy-research organization —
said in an interview. That's partly because above-average numbers of
poor people go to church, and church attenders give more money than
non-attenders to secular and religious charities, Brooks found.
Moreover, disproportionate numbers of poor people belong to
congregations that tithe.

Less-religious
givers such as Emel Sweeney, 73, a retired bookkeeper, say that giving
lights up their lives. "Have you ever looked into the face of someone
you're being generous to?" Sweeney asked with the trace of a Jamaican
lilt. That brought to mind her encounter with a young woman who was
struggling to manage four small, tired children on a bus. They
staggered and straggled at a transfer stop, along with Sweeney, who
urged the mother to take a nearby cab the rest of the way. When the
mother said she had no money, Sweeney gave her $20, she said. The
mother, as she piled her brood into the cab, waved and mouthed a
thank-you. "Those words just rested in my chest," Sweeney said, "and as
I rode home I was so happy."


Pastor Coletta Jones, who
ministers to a largely low-income tithing congregation in southeast
Washington, The Rock Christian Church, thinks that poor people give
more because they ask for less for themselves. "When you have just a
little, you're thankful for what you have," Jones said, "but with every
step you take up the ladder of success, the money clouds your mind and
gets you into a state of never being satisfied."

What
makes poor people's generosity even more impressive is that their
giving generally isn't tax-deductible, because they don't earn enough
to justify itemizing their charitable tax deductions. In effect, giving
a dollar to charity costs poor people a dollar while it costs deduction
itemizers 65 cents. In addition, measures of generosity typically
exclude informal giving, such as that of Davis' late mother, Helen
Coleman. Coleman, a Baltimore hotel housekeeper, provided child care,
beds and meals for many of her eight children and 32 grandchildren,
Davis said.


Federal surveys don't ask about remittances
specifically, so it's hard to know how much the poorest fifth sends
back home. Remittances from U.S. immigrants totaled more than $100
billion in 2007, according to Manuel Orozco, a senior researcher at
Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington policy institute, who specializes
in remittances. By comparison, individual giving to tax-deductible U.S.
charities totaled about $220 billion in 2007.

Much
of the money remitted comes from struggling U.S. immigrants such as
Zenaida Araviza, 42, a Macy's cosmetics clerk and single mother in
suburban Arlington, Va. Araviza, who earns $1,300 a month, goes
carless, cable-less and cell phone-less in order to send an aunt in the
Philippines $200 a month to care for Araviza's mother, who has
Alzheimer's. "What can I do?" asked Araviza, an attractive, somber
woman. "It's my responsibility." Carmen De Jesus, the chief financial
officer and treasurer of Forex Inc., a remittance agency based in
Springfield, Va., said low-income Filipino-Americans such as Araviza
were her most generous customers. "The domestic helpers send very, very
frequently," she said. "The doctors, less so."


Why are
they so generous? Christie Zerrudo, a cashier who handles Filipino
remittances at Manila Oriental, a grocery/restaurant/remittance agency
in Arlington, offered this explanation: "It gives the heart comfort
when you sit down at the end of the day, and you know that you did your
part," Zerrudo said. "You took care of your family. If you eat here,
they eat there, too. It would give you stress if they couldn't. But you
love them, they are your family, and your love has had an expression."

https://www.mcclatchydc.com/226/story/68456.html

posted on Dec 7, 2009 10:51 AM ()

Comment on this article   


2,425 articles found   [ Previous Article ]  [ Next Article ]  [ First ]  [ Last ]