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When Joe Biden went to New Hampshire on Thursday to attack Mitt Romney’s tax proposals, the Romney campaign greeted Biden by attacking President Barack Obama’s charitable giving rate.

The problem with this attack is that the contrast is not all that interesting, at least not in the way that Sununu suggested. As a percentage of gross income, Barack and Michelle Obama gave 14% of their income to charity in 2010. That happens to be the same percentage that Mitt and Ann Romney gave to charity in the same year. The Romney charity number ($2,983,374) is a lot bigger than the Obama charity number ($245,075), but that is simply because the Romney family made 12.5 times as much as the Obama family in 2010.

Perhaps Sununu had meant to focus his attack just on Biden, who has a history of giving far less to charity. In 2010, Joe and Jill Biden only gave about 1.4% of their income to charity. But it is also true that Biden is not rich in the way that Obama and Romney are rich. A 2006 ranking of the net worth of U.S. Senators found Biden to be the poorest. That does not make him actually poor—his income in 2010 was $379,178– but it does mean that Biden has to devote more of his income to actual expenses than either Romney or Obama. More at http://swampland.time.com/2012/04/13/is-mitt-romney-really-more-charit
able-than-barack-obama/

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