Wingnuttery: Selfish blue states?

Update [2004-11-16 20:5:50 by dennisdeveny]: There's actually a good con argument at Samuel Johnson.

A wingnut alum from my college sent me this from the Catalogue For Philanthropy.

He claims that Howard Stern was circulating a hoax list of average IQ's with red states filling the bottom half and blue the top*.

The philanthropy list is the opposite: the generous states are painted red and the selfish ones are blue.

My initial response (assuming the data are accurate) is: that's to be expected.

One difference between Democrats and Republicans is that Democrats feel that benevolent support should come through government while fiscal conservatives would rather have it come through non-government charitable organizations. I would hope that Reps actually give to these organizations as they are apparently voting for their tax dollars to go to foreign wars.

Further, the states are ranked by degree of "having". The poorest states (red) are at the top of the list. Poorer states are going to have a greater need for giving. Wouldn't any analysis like this always have the poorest states at the list's top?

Any additional thoughts are welcome.

*I saw an email with such a list but I couldn't verify its accuracy so I didn't pass it along - but I don't necessarily buy it was a "hoax".