Now let's tax churches, like Frank Zappa suggested :)
1. My city main hospital, belongs to Catholic Church, same applies to many other cities.
2. Many of our leading universities, doing research and important work, belong to Catholic Church, notably PUC-RIO, the creators of Lua language.
3. Protestant churches here are the major organizations driving away drug dealers, some took the donations to build better light system in public parks, provide free food, counseling, and so on.
4. We have an hospital considered one of the best of world for certain treatments, to the point people from first world countries sometimes come here for this hospital, and it belongs to a Jewish organization.
And the list goes and goes on... a lot of public infrastructure here belongs to religious organizations, if the government taxed them the result would be the government suddenly needing to spend a ton of their own money replacing what these organizations are doing, and I doubt it would work well, for example the government-owned hospital in my city killed people more than once for stupid reasons (including giving penicilin to a guy that warned them he was allergic!), so the population rely on the catholic hospital instead.
EDIT: reading a sibling comment made me remember another important one: the religious organizations here are major drivers for cultural education, for example our public-owned orchestras are often filled with church-trained people, ditto for audio engineering, theather and many other "art"-related professions.
The churches that will pay high taxes are the ones that have the income but dont spend it and put it into investments to build their wealth.
So in this way, I think taxing churches and also charities makes sense. There will be some fringe cases but largely those that do things with their funds will not be effected and those that hoard funds or use it to circumvent taxes will be the ones paying.
Tax profits, so that any existing donations would be tax deductible?
Not sure I really agree with taxing donations - I do think that it would cut down on how much churches bring in (as in people would be less likely to donate), and are able to distribute as a commenter above said.
Now, I do believe that all other related income should be taxed by churches, whereas I think only "unrelated" income is taxable now. So for example:
Church makes original christian music and makes income from spotify (or other sources)
Church records their services and puts them on youtube (and monitizes them)
Church rents out building for weddings or other events.
etc
(some of these may or may not be currently taxable, I am not an expert but my quick search seems to think they may not be)
So you can tax the golden altars they build, or the private jets the pastors fly around on, or the castles the leaders live in.
There's a huge sham in all this.
People willingly donate to these places so if they don't care about it why should we?
In my opinion we shouldn't be taxing church graveyards, we should give the buildings an exemption if they use the buildings for non-denominational community events like so many churches do, and we should definitely be taxing their paved parking lots.
It's a waste of time to tax them and it's not going to be used for anything helpful in this country. After seeing where the US government is blowing our tax money on these supposed "stimulus" bills I can't understand why anyone would support taxing more things in this country.
If this is the best argument for not taxing churches, then I switch positions and say tax them and reduce my taxes. (But do it properly, which likely requires some Constitutional hand wringing.)
How about you just leave the churches alone and admit you're being biased because you dislike religion? The burden is on you to prove we need that tax money for something since you're proposing a change to something that's been in place since the US's inception and is a main tenet of the constitution.
And there's also the MAIN reason which is the fact that it's expressly against the 1st amendment since it would give the government the free reign to tax any religion it dislikes out of existence and break church/state separation.
I don't grant you the unilateral right to decide what places 'help people': that is a political question, and I didn't vote for you. You may not be particularly representative. In fact, according to the OP, you're not a majority here, so your attitude is not democratic, though it is still political.
Being a majority on an internet forum is obviously not representative of the entirety of the US and is a pretty silly argument for changing an amendment, as is assuming that because people don't attend church they want it taxed.
Maybe you should take some time actually understanding the constitution instead of dedicating your time to inane internet attacks?
Pro tip - stop trying to control things you dislike, it's extremely anti-progressive and reeks of the same sort of intolerance ultra conservative religious groups display. Ironic eh?
Lastly, this country is not a 100% democracy and it's a Republic for a reason. That reason is so that the minority get a say in what happens and don't get stomped out. This is a good thing and you'll realize it when you're not in the majority at some point.