Stephen King is well-known for churning out brilliantly written novels. Somehow that brilliance doesn’t translate to his thoughts on politics, where King comes across as a petulant child.
Here is King’s latest asinine political tweet:
A Salon headline articulated a question I’ve been asking myself for years: Why are Republicans so mean to poor people?
— Stephen King (@StephenKing) March 23, 2017
King’s first mistake was taking a Salon headline seriously. His second mistake was whining about Republicans for supposedly being big meanies to the poor. The statistics simply do not support his childish assertion.
Here are seven statistics that show Republicans are not mean to poor people:
1. Fifty-four percent of registered Republicans donated to charity while only 45 percent of Democrats did so. This is according to 2012 data compiled by the Huffington Post, which also found that 51 percent of registered voters donated to charity while only 22 percent of those who aren’t registered to vote donated to charity.
2. Thirty-three percent of Republicans volunteered their time to charitable work; 24 percent of Democrats did the same, according to the Huffington Post.
3. Nine out of ten of the states that donated the most charity voted for Mitt Romney in 2012.
.@StephenKing You were saying? pic.twitter.com/wXz7SWlT7z
— Kayla (@VixenRogue) March 24, 2017
There is one important caveat: once charity to religious organizations are taken out of the equation, the more left-wing northeastern states emerge as the more charitable states. But not only do religious organizations like churches provide charitable aid to the less fortunate, they teach philanthropic values to their members. They also increase the likelihood of the wealthy being introduced to people in poverty, thereby raising the likelihood that those who are rich will donate money to charity and volunteer for charitable causes. So, it’s valid to include donating to religious institutions as donations to charity.
4. Conservative households donated 30 percent more of their money to charity than left-wing households. This is despite the fact that left-wing households had six percent higher incomes than conservative households, according to data from Arthur Brooks in 2008.
5. The percentage of families living in “deep poverty” was 5.5 percent before welfare-to-work reform was passed in 1996; that number was reduced to 2.5 percent in 2007. The Republican Congress sent the welfare reform bill to President Bill Clinton’s desk twice before he finally relented and signed it on Congress’s third attempt. The bill clearly helped lift people out of poverty. Today, the percentage of families in “deep poverty” is closer to three percent but that’s because of the sluggish nature of Barack Obama’s economy.
For more on the welfare reform bill, read the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector’s piece on it here.
6. During Ronald Reagan’s presidency, 86 percent of those in the poorest 20 percent of income brackets in 1979 lifted themselves into better income brackets. The Left likes to claim that Reagan’s presidency slammed the poor in favor of the wealthy, but this statistic from the Treasury Department debunks that claim, according to David Limbaugh.
7. The free-market values that underlie the Republican platform have lifted more people out of poverty worldwide than any government program ever could. The Daily Wire has a bevy of statistics on that here.
A couple of questions for King: if Republicans are mean to the poor, then why do they donate more to charity than Democrats? Why is it that their policies actually lift people out of poverty while Democrat policies keep them there?
King’s political tweeting history suggests that he won’t consider such questions; he will only continue to tweet about supposedly mean Republicans, encapsulating the childlike mindset of the Left.