How to give 'till it hurts. Or at least looks like it hurts.

Think Progress give the Walton brood the smackdown for their donations to hurricane relief. Bush pere praises their selflessness.

At a press conference this afternoon, President George H. W. Bush singled out the Walton Family for their generosity to Katrina relief efforts:

I don’t think anyone would mind if I singled out the chairman and CEO of Wal-Mart, Lee Scott, who is right here. He told us that they gave the Bush-Clinton fund a total of $23 million…$15 million from the company and then $8 million more from the Walton family, the marvelous philanthropists that they are.

Let’s put that in perspective. The Walton family’s net worth is $90 billion. So $8 million dollars represents .009 percent of their total.

The average family’s net worth is $86,100. If an average family contributed at the same rate as the Waltons, they’d donate $7.74.

The first thing that came to mind here was Republican insistence that it's unfair for taxes to be progressive, because it 'punishes' the wealthy. But looked at through this lens, I gave a higher proportion of my net worth than the Waltons-- whose wealth was inherited, I might add. Why should altruism be the burden of the poor?