Absolutely! Many conservatives seem to forget this. (On another thread, someone once posted that Jesus meant only what used to be called "the deserving poor"!) I've always been of the view that it is at least as important for us to give as for the poor to receive.
I have known individual liberals (as well as individual conservatives) who take it seriously, but many of those hold actual poor people in utter contempt, which I don't think is quite what Christ had in mind.
Even to the extent that liberals purport to care about the poor and to the extent that they are sincere, well, Chesterton has a passage (I don't recall where; it may come to me) about breaking the virtues apart: they lose their proper identity in separation and go wild, lose their "virtue" as it were.
Very true. And a good number of those liberals have deep enough pockets to donate to groups and organizations that prey on the poor and persuade them to keep the numbers of "poor" chicldren and "children living in poverty" down. It's not a crime to be poor other than in these people's eyes.