Re: another reason to cut social spending -- more church influence

[Eugene Coyle <eugenecoyle@xxxxxxx>]

Do they have data showing where the Churches spent all the money they
stopped using for charity?  Did parishioners stop contributing because
they knew the government was taking care of everything?  What is their
data on parishioners income, in those years, and how much did
contributions drop?

   SOTS.  (Is that a regular acronym, like lol, or imo?)

Gene

michael perelman wrote:

> "Faith-Based Charity and Crowd Out during the Great Depression"
>
>      BY:  JONATHAN GRUBER
>              Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
>              Department of Economics
>              National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
>           DANIEL M. HUNGERMAN
>              Duke University
>              Department of Economics
>
> Document:  Available from the SSRN Electronic Paper Collection:
>           http://papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?abstract_id=723301
>
> Paper ID:  NBER Working Paper No. W11332
>    Date:  May 2005
>
> Contact:  JONATHAN GRUBER
>   Email:  Mailto:gruberj@xxxxxxx
>  Postal:  Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
>           Department of Economics
>           Room E52-355
>           50 Memorial Drive
>           Cambridge, MA 02142  UNITED STATES
>   Phone:  617-253-8892
>     Fax:  617-253-1330
> Co-Auth:  DANIEL M. HUNGERMAN
>   Email:  Mailto:danh@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
>  Postal:  Duke University
>           Department of Economics
>           Durham, NC 27708-0204  UNITED STATES
>
> ABSTRACT:
> Interest in religious organizations as providers of social
> services has increased dramatically in recent years. Churches in
> the U.S. were a crucial provider of social services through the
> early part of the twentieth century, but their role shrank
> dramatically with the expansion in government spending under the
> New Deal. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which the
> New Deal crowded out church charitable spending in the 1930s. We
> do so using a new nationwide data set of charitable spending for
> six large Christian denominations, matched to data on local New
> Deal spending. We instrument for New Deal spending using
> measures of the political strength of a state's congressional
> delegation, and confirm our findings using a different
> instrument based on institutional constraints on state relief
> spending. With both instruments we find that higher government
> spending leads to lower church charitable activity. Crowd-out
> was small as a share of total New Deal spending (3%), but large
> as a share of church spending: our estimates suggest that church
> spending fell by 30% in response to the New Deal, and that
> government relief spending can explain virtually all of the
> decline in charitable church activity observed between 1933 and
> 1939.
>
> --
>
> Michael Perelman
> Economics Department
> California State University
> michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
> Chico, CA 95929
> 530-898-5321
> fax 530-898-5901