Charity

This year, Joe and Jill Biden increased their charitable donations from 1.5 percent of their income to 1.87 percent.

John Kerry, who is worth an estimated $198.65 million, will donate $9,175 because of the so-called sequestration. 

"A day after Obama and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said they'd return 5 percent of their paycheck to the Treasury, Secretary of State John Kerry followed in somewhat similar fashion," the Huffington Post reports.

Defeat, like death, concentrates the mind wonderfully. It also liberates the mind. People venture to think the unthinkable, or at least, the impermissible. A new generation of conservatives may be moved to reconsider some ideas that have fallen into disuse or even disrepute. Compassion is one such idea. 

The day after Long Cai Bin was baptized, an earthquake destroyed his hometown. But it might have opened his country to his faith.

The release of Mitt Romney’s 2011 tax returns shows that he freely gave away more than $4 million to charity last year (about 30 percent of his income).  In comparison, when Joe Biden was first running for vice president, his tax returns showed that he had given away just $3,690 to charity over the previous ten years (about 0.2 percent of his income).  In other words, Romney gave away a thousand times as much to charity in one year as Biden gave in a decade.

The Romney campaign is releasing Mitt and Ann Romney's 2011 tax return today. The campaign previews a few of the highlights here:

Spirit of America is a wonderful charity that helps provide equipment—or whatever else is needed—to help American soldiers complete their mission in Afghanistan. We last wrote about their successful campaign to raise money to get cleft palate surgery for two Afghan children, and WEEKLY STANDARD readers promptly pitched in to help fund their efforts.

Spirit of America is a fantastic charity that raises money to help provide whatever American troops overseas need to complete their mission. Recently, they raised the funds necessary to pay for the cleft palate surgeries of two Afghan children at the request of U.S. special operations soldiers.

Now Spirit of America is requesting donations to buy two dirt bikes for Afghan police working with U.S.troops:

President Obama and Vice President Biden released their tax returns today, ahead of Tax Day, which is on April 17 this year (since April 15 falls on a Sunday and Monday is a Washington, D.C. holiday).

A few months ago, when President Obama proposed to restrict the deductibility of charitable contributions made by relatively well-off Americans, I asked why Obama is so opposed to having money go directly to the needy, rather than having it first be filtered through the government.

President Obama likes to talk about how “millionaires and billionaires” who make over $200,000 a year need “to give back a little bit more.” But by restricting charitable deductions, his proposed jobs bill would incentivize them to give back a little bit less. In today’s Wall Street Journal, former Major League Baseball commissioner Fay Vincent takes exception: