ATR takes a shot at Obama’s cheapness.

Below is the percentage of the Obama’s adjusted gross income that went to charity for each year (and this even includes Rev. Wright’s church-o-hate): 2006: 6.1% 2005: 4.7% 2004: 1.2% 2003: 1.4% 2002: 0.4% 2001: 0.5% 2000: 0.9% At least he had the good sense to start giving a laugh-test amount once he decided to run for President.

I remembered at least one article in the New York Times about the stinginess of Obama’s cousin, Dick Cheney — from September 2, 2000 and by Adam Clymer. So I dug it up:

Mr. and Mrs. Cheney’s tax returns not only showed a sharp increase in adjusted gross income from 1992 to 1999, they also showed total contributions to charities of $209,832, or just over 1 percent of their 10-year income of $20,677,742.
Trying to put a more generous face on those figures, a statement by the Bush-Cheney campaign said $442,152 actually went to charity.
That total was reached by adding $89,500 in honorariums, which Mr. Cheney [donated to charity] and $142,820 in grants from corporations on whose boards the two had served, which matched their contributions.

(The brackets in that last paragraph reflect a correction subsequently made by the Times to the original story, which had wrongly insinuated that Cheney donated the honoraria because he was required to.)

In any case, as the ATR blog notes, Obama was smarter about his donations from a political perspective, but probably not in terms of the donations’ recipients (such as the Rev. Jeremiah “Garlic-Nose” Wright).