Trancredo's $400 Haircut

If you're Tom Tancredo, how do you prove that you're a real presidential candidate? Maybe by taking up a New Hampshire businessman on his offer to give you a $400 haircut, a la John Edwards or Bill Clinton, but with the proceeds going to an autism charity. Mike Huckabee has apparently already done it, and an unnamed Democrat has an appointment.

I know I'm supposed to view this story as a light-hearted spoof, but it cuts deeper. The gap between Edwards' lifestyle and his preoccupation with the "other America," i.e., the one that can't afford $400 haircuts, underlines the reality that religious conservatives donate far more of their income to charity than do secular liberals, as demonstrated by Syracuse economist Arthur Brooks.

His initial research for Who Really Cares revealed that religion played a far more significant role in giving than he had previously believed. In 2000, religious people gave about three and a half times as much as secular people - $2,210 versus $642. And even when religious giving is excluded from the numbers, Mr. Brooks found, religious people still give $88 more per year to nonreligious charities.

He writes that religious people are more likely than the nonreligious to volunteer for secular charitable activities, give blood, and return money when they are accidentally given too much change.

"There is not one measurably significant way I have ever found in which religious people are not more charitable than nonreligious people," Mr. Brooks says. "The fact is, if it weren't for religious people in your community, the PTA would shut down."

And it goes beyond charity, and beyond haircuts -- to global warming. Edwards and Algore Himself, the Pope of global warming, live such a carbon indulgent lifestyle, mitigated in Algore's case by the laughably mythical carbon offset indulgences. As Glen Reynolds puts it: "I'll believe it's a crisis when those who say its a crisis act like it's a crisis." The same is true of Edwards' other America.