You give religions more than $82.5 billion a year

[rug]

By Dylan Matthews, Published: August 22 at 2:32 pmE

Matt Yglesias thinks we ought to start taxing churches. “Whichever faith you think is the one true faith, it’s undeniable that the majority of this church-spending is going to support false doctrines,” he notes. Even if you did direct the money toward the one true faith, it’d still be a bad idea, as “Upgrading a church’s physical plant doesn’t enhance the soul-saving capacity of its clergy.”

Regardless of whether you buy Yglesias’s logic, this raises an interesting question — exactly how much money are we talking about here? If, all of a sudden, churches, synagogues, mosques and the like lost their tax privileges, how much tax revenue would that generate?

Ryan T. Cragun, a sociologist at the University of Tampa, and two of his students, Stephanie Yeager and Desmond Vega, took it upon themselves to figure it out. They’re not exactly disinterested parties; their research appeared in Free Inquiry, a publication of the Council for Secular Humanism. But Cragun is a serious sociologist of religion and the data seems to check out. The full scale of subsidies religions get is pretty staggering:



When people donate to religious groups, it’s tax-deductible. Churches don’t pay property taxes on their land or buildings. When they buy stuff, they don’t pay sales taxes. When they sell stuff at a profit, they don’t pay capital gains tax. If they spend less than they take in, they don’t pay corporate income taxes. Priests, ministers, rabbis and the like get “parsonage exemptions” that let them deduct mortgage payments, rent and other living expenses when they’re doing their income taxes. They also are the only group allowed to opt out of Social Security taxes (and benefits).



http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/08/22/you-give-religions-more-than-82-5-billion-a-year/?tid=pm_pop

[MotherPetrie]

1. Tax these businesses.

[madrchsod]

2. change the separation of church and state clause

then rewrite the reasoning.

the biggest problem is the suckers who are born every minute who give money to a tv preacher who lives in a palace and returns nothing to where those people live.
in my city all of the pastors and priests live in modest middle class homes and most are on church property. my 140 yr old church was reroofed.it cost 75,000 dollars which took 3/4 of the years building fund. none of the ministers,pastors,and priests in my town are publically political.

[cbayer]

3. Change it to what?

I think the problem here lies primarily with the IRS.

While most churches do not violate the rules/laws regarding non-profits in general and churches in particular, some clearly do.

Those megachurches with their multi-million dollar parsonages are clearly in violation, but the IRS turns a blind eye. While their numbers are small, they make everyone look bad.

[rug]

4. "the power to tax involves the power to destroy" - John Marshall

That the power to tax involves the power to destroy; that the power to destroy may defeat and render useless the power to create; that there is a plain repugnance in conferring on one Government a power to control the constitutional measures of another, which other, with respect to those very measures, is declared to be supreme over that which exerts the control, are propositions not to be denied. But all inconsistencies are to be reconciled by the magic of the word CONFIDENCE. Taxation, it is said, does not necessarily and unavoidably destroy. To carry it to the excess of destruction would be an abuse, to presume which would banish that confidence which is essential to all Government. McCulloch v. Maryland - 17 U.S. 316, at 431 (1819)

http://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/17/316/case.html

There's 200 years of jurisprudence to overcome first. A more likely solution is to rewrite the tax code to clearly and stringently define what expenses are and are not exemptions.

[cbayer]

5. I would be interested in what the numbers are for non-profits in general

and how big a piece of the pie religious groups represent.

I would also be interested in what "religious" groups were included in this data. Does it include things like Associated Catholic Charities? Some further breakdown of the data would be helpful, but I don't see a link to more information about this.

[rug]

6. I agree. From reading the article, it looked like a daunting task to assemble just this data.

[rrneck]

7. Insert smart ass NSA crack here. nt

[cbayer]

8. Which is why it would be helpful to know how he derived it.

It's a number likely to be batted around, but any rational person who uses reasons to analyze data would have to question how he got these numbers.