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Comment by saddestcatever | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't it be similar to corporate tax?

Tax profits, so that any existing donations would be tax deductible?

Unsure exactly what you mean, church costs - donations = taxable "profits"?

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)

The churches can say they have no profits, but there's a lot of money getting spent on dubious things that a typical non-profit doesn't have.

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.

Let's not pretend non-profits don't fall victim to the same bs. All you need to do is look at the Susan G. Komen foundation.

People willingly donate to these places so if they don't care about it why should we?

Why? What do we need that money for? If you don't like it then just don't go to church and the problem is solved. Obviously less people are attending so it sounds like it'll just solve itself in the future. No one is making anyone attend church and give offerings. It's just letting the government double dip on taxes at that point. Everything given to a church is essentially a donation to begin with and you want to have it taxed a second time after the church gets it?

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.

> It's a waste of time to tax them and it's not going to be used for anything helpful 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.)

That'll never happen and you know it. It'll be tax the church and your taxes will continue to rise. It's just as silly as the idea that taxing the rich more will reduce your tax.

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.

If we started taxing churches, what would kill them would be the property taxes. Some churches are sitting on immensely valuable property.

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.

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