Friday night on “Real Time with Bill Maher,” host Bill Maher went after presumptive Republican nominee Governor Mitt Romney (R-MA)’s assertion that he gives millions away every year in charity. Giving the standard tithe to the Mormon church, in Maher’s opinion, somehow doesn’t have quite the same altruistic heft as donating money to help children in the developing world who need corrective surgery or feeding the hungry.

ADVERTISEMENT

Spending millions of dollars each year to send proselytizing twenty-something missionaries all over the world is, Maher said, kind of a waste of money. Perhaps the missionaries should “save the book and the tie” and offer themselves to the people of famine-ravaged Namibia as food.

Maher asserted that the real problem here, however, is that when Romney’s money goes into what Maher first calls his “cult,” then softens to “ridiculous church,” taxpayers have to make up the shortfall. Charitable deductions, he said, take more than 60 billion dollars a year out of the public coffer, money that has to come from other programs and services.

“So it is fair,” he said, “to ask what constitues a charity.”

Watch the video, embedded via Mediaite, below: