I mispell things!
I’m presently reading “Resident Aliens” by Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon and just read the following quote which goes along well with my thoughts from yesterday.
… the fundamental issue, when it comes to Christian ethics, is not whether we shall be conservative or liberal, left or right, but whether we shall be faithful to the church’s peculiar vision of what it means to live and act as disciples. p. 69
Yep, that about sums it up.
Just read a couple of articles that I thought were interesting regarding the giving of the the 2016 presidential candidates. You can find the articles I read here and here. There are still quite a few candidates whose giving isn’t known yet because either they have not yet released for public viewing their tax documents or the documents they have released did not include their charitable giving.
Anyhow here is a list of the charitable giving I was able to find for our 2016 Presidential Politicians Charitable Giving. I will update this list as I find more information.
Candidates whose giving is unknown at this time.
For some comparison I thought it would be nice to have two things for comparison. First, supposedly the average US household gives around 3-5% to charity. While I haven’t yet found an actual source for that stat (several articles have mentioned 3-5% but I haven’t found links to actual evidence associated with them) yet it does makes sense using two known numbers. The average American household gave $2,974 in 2014 (found here) and the average American household income was $53,657 in 2014 (found here). This equals 5.5% so I feel safe in presuming that 3-5% is close.
Second, here is the charitable giving from the 2012 presidential candidates’ tax documents. I thing the giving of both is quite impressive.
I don’t know that we should vote for someone just because of their charitable giving but I do find it interesting to see who gives more substantially and who doesn’t.