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by Paul R. Hollrah
With the possible exception of the mainstream media – who apparently believe that Barack Obama’s wealth is not newsworthy, but the number of homes owned by Cindy McCain is – there is much written these days about the dire economic circumstances of Obama’s 25-year-old half brother, George Hussein Onyango Obama.
According to press reports, George Obama has been located by Italian Vanity Fair living in a six-foot by nine-foot makeshift hut on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya, subsisting on less than $1 a month. He told reporters, “If anyone says anything about my surname, I say we are not related. I am ashamed…no one knows who I am. I have had to learn to live and take what I need.”
Reading that response, one might be led to believe that George Obama and his famous brother, Barack, have never met – but that’s not the case. In his book, Dreams from My Father (page 431), Barack writes of meeting his youngest brother briefly in a schoolyard in Nairobi in 1988, a meeting that Barack described as “a painful affair, arranged hastily and without his mother’s knowledge.” Obama described his brother, then five years of age, as a “handsome, round-headed (as opposed to square-headed?) boy with a wary gaze.”
The two met a second time in September 2006 as Obama junketed in Africa, beginning at Cape Town and touring north through Kenya, the Congo, Djibouti, and Sudan. As George Obama described that meeting, “It was very brief. We spoke for just a few minutes. It was like meeting a complete stranger.”
But what seems to be of greatest interest on this side of the Atlantic is the fact that, while Barack Obama lives in a $2.6 million mansion on the south side of Chicago, enjoying an annual income of well over $1 million, his brother in Kenya lives on less than $12 a year. And while there is probably no truth to the rumor that Barack recently sent his brother a $5 bill, suggesting that he take a few months off, it is instructive to note that he has done little to help his extended family. Always preferring to use other people’s money to assuage their own feelings of guilt for living in the U.S., the world’s most prosperous nation, it’s just not the kind of thing that liberals do.
In his book, Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth about Compassionate Conservatism, Syracuse University professor Arthur C. Brooks uncovered some interesting facts about the relative generosity of liberals and conservatives. Professor Brooks found that:
- Although liberal family incomes average 6 percent higher than those of conservative families, conservative households give, on average, 30 percent more to charity than the average liberal household ($1,600 per year, per family, vs. $1,227).
- Conservatives donate more time to community service and they give more blood.
- George W. Bush carried 24 of the 25 states where charitable giving was above average.
- In the 10 reddest states, where Bush received more than 60 percent of the vote, the average percentage of personal income donated to charity was 3.5 percent.
- In the bluest states, where John Kerry received more than 60 percent of the vote, the average percentage of personal income donated to charity was just 1.9 percent.
- Conservatives, who reject the idea that government has a responsibility to reduce income disparity between the rich and the poor, give, on average, four times more than liberals who feel that government has that responsibility.
Like most Americans, Brooks had been conditioned to believe that, because liberals are always harping about the plight of the poor, they must care more about the poor than do conservatives. However, when his research proved otherwise, he checked and rechecked his findings, but the conclusion was always the same: Conservatives are far more generous than liberals.
To the liberal mind, assigning the responsibility for helping the poor to government bureaucrats makes assisting the poor much more “efficient.” And besides, if we pass that responsibility off to government bureaucrats it’s not necessary for us to get our hands dirty.
As a principal sponsor of the Global Poverty Act (S.2433) now under consideration in the U.S. Senate, Barack Obama has said, “Eliminating global poverty remains one of the greatest challenges we face. With billions of people around the world forced to live on just dollars a day, we can – and must – make it a priority of our foreign policy to commit to eliminating extreme poverty and ensuring every child has food, shelter, and clean drinking water… Our commitment to the global economy has to extend beyond trade agreements that are more about increasing corporate profits than about helping workers and small farmers everywhere.”
Obama fails to tell us how American taxpayers ended up with the responsibility for eliminating world poverty; why it must be a priority of American foreign policy to ensure that every child in the world has food, shelter, and clean drinking water; and just what it is about job-creating trade agreements he finds so objectionable. Perhaps he will let us all in on that mystery in the months ahead.
In the meantime, it is estimated that Obama’s global outreach program will cost the American taxpayer roughly $845 billion over a 13-year period. Spreading that amount across the entire African population of 768 million, Obama’s bill would give every man, woman, and child in Africa a windfall of just over $1,100.
Obama learned everything he knows about politics in the Democratic “welfare plantation” of south Chicago. If his goal is to shift the responsibility for assisting his grandmother, his brother George, and the rest of his extended family in Kenya to the American taxpayer – as we might expect a liberal to do – you’ve gotta give him credit. His plan to eliminate worldwide poverty is nepotism on a grand scale.
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