President Obama said, at a campaign stop at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia on the 12th of June,
They [voters] have pretty good instincts about what works and they’re not persuaded that an economy built on the notion that everybody here is on their own is somehow going to result in a stronger, more prosperous America.
It doesn’t get any clearer than this statement, which demonstrates an utter lack of understanding of what life is like without government intimately involved in it, without government ensuring that we’re not being too selfish to help each other out. But with remarks like this, Democrats are only projecting their own selfishness onto the rest of us.
Americans as a whole donated over $300 billion to charity in 2009, for instance, the third year in a row we donated more than $300 billion in a single year. In 2008, within these $300 billion, Gallup says that conservatives donated 3.5% to 4.5% of their incomes; liberals donated 1.25% to 1.5%. Senator Joe Biden, who now considers it the patriotic thing to do to pay lots of taxes, donated 0.1% of his income in each of the years 2001-2004. Last year, Vice President Biden bumped his giving to the lofty level of 1.5%. It’s certainly true that Obama, and a fellow Progressive, President Bill Clinton, give significantly more, but these two are not typical Democrats, as those numbers above demonstrate.
Americans—conservative Americans, at any rate—do our duty, we help our fellows. We don’t need government hands in our pockets to do that. We need government hands out of our pockets so we can do that better.
Democrats assume all of America is like them. Fortunately, we’re not. Not by a long shot.