Missing a big one there. I know that taxing religious organizations would NEVER fly in the US, but.. can you imagine?
Most of the value of churches is in real estate. I imagine a lot of the Mainline protestant denominations (typically the most liberal), who have low and declining attendance, would be hit the hardest as they own a lot of historic downtown properties worth in the tens of millions.
Conservative Protestant, and Catholic churches own a lot of real estate too, but they have bigger congregations.
If you have a $10,000,000 property that owes 1.5% property taxes a year, that's about $150,000 in taxes every year.
If you have 15 families earning $100,000 a year who each tithe (or 30 families earning $50,000 a year), then you break even on those taxes (you still have the rest of your church expenses to pay, of course).
I'm not aware of the rate of tithing and attendance in Conservative Protestant, and Catholic churches, but I'm guessing it's higher than in mainline Protestant Churches. I imagine non-mainline churches also have a wider portfolio of real estate; they probably own their own share of prime real estate in downtown city centers, but most of their churches are likely dispersed in suburban and rural areas with much lower value land.
My hypothesis (confidence: 75% sure, but haven't done all the necessary math) is that if you were to push for a full repeal of church property tax exemptions, Megachurches, Conservative Protestants, and Catholics would be very upset about it, but would probably be able to weather the storm, and Mainline protestant churches and other minority religious organizations with high value urban property and low relative attendance would essentially be wiped out overnight.
In short -- if you're a liberal, be careful what you wish for.
The big one they missed were think tanks. That's where the real corruption is. Oh and will you look at that... the Tax Foundation is a 501(c)(3) think tank based in D.C. Things that make you go hmmm.
I'm not saying he's a good person, but he has personal income just like the rest of us. The odd clergy exemptions to the personal income tax are not that large: https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc417
And like the rest of his fellow mega-wealthy, he'll be able to fiddle it away in a number of ways.
The flights (and dinners, and cushy hotels, and big parties) will be for "church business". The "fair rental value" of his home will be immense, and "reasonable compensation for the minister's services" will be something the IRS is reluctant to fight over.
Yeah, too bad that's a command they don't even follow.
> in the name of a religion that commands its followers to give everything they have to the poor.
This isn't actually true. The point of this story (as with a lot of things Jesus did) is that the standards for us to be righteous on our own merit is impossibly high, but that God in his mercy will forgive us anyway. That's why the next bit says that Jesus' disciples asked "who then can be saved?", and Jesus replies that with God, all things are possible. To be righteous in our own merits we would have to take extreme steps like selling all our material possessions (and more), but we don't have to because of God's grace.
That said, we are explicitly commanded to care for the poor and other downtrodden members of society. Not being required to sell all our possessions is not a pass to just ignore the poor, or to half-ass our efforts towards them. It's just that we aren't actually commanded to sell all our possessions.
Do you understand how tax breaks work? If you make 100k, and tithe 10% of that you don't get a 10k tax break, you just don't pay taxes on that 10k. You're still out the money, and best case you could rationalize it as only costing you 8-8.5k (depending on your marginal tax rate), but it's not some magic sauce that gets 'the wealthier' free money.
"Tax Exempt Organization Search (Pub. 78 data) is based on information received in applications seeking recognition of exemption under Internal Revenue Code section 501(c)(3). Churches, their integrated auxiliaries, conventions or associations of churches, and public charities whose annual gross receipts are normally not more than $5,000 may be treated as tax-exempt without filing an application. Also, many churches are included in group exemptions (see below). Thus, they may not be listed in Tax Exempt Organization Search (Pub. 78 data)."
https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/contributors/other...
Taxing churches would then be a way for government to suppress and eliminate religion/religious organizations they do not like. Start taxing today with a "reasonable" tax, and tomorrow you can raise tax obligations until operation is unsustainable. A la "subsidize things you want more of, tax things you want less of".
Despite what non-religious and/or anti-religious people may want, this is untenable and almost certainly unconstitutional.
As an aside - the federal government has plenty of money. We don't need to go looking in the seat cushions for pocket change. Instead of "Reining in America's $3.3T Tax-Exempt Economy", we should be "Reining in America's Overindulgent Lifestyle and Runaway Spending Spree".
I don't know what the IRS standards are for recognizing religions, but taxing unrecognized religions and not taxing recognized religions seems like a bigger potential for suppression of undesired religions than taxing all of them. That said, I don't think I've heard of a case where IRS/government refused to acknowledge a claimed religious organization?
Of course, you can't have free exercise of religion if it's taxed. I do think it'd be nice to have public tax returns or similar, but I guess that's really for the membership to demand more than the government.
Perhaps illustrating your point, but worth noting anyhow: the dangerous for-profit cult of Scientology actually had to infiltrate the IRS with their own people to get their tax exempt status.
Being “tax exempt” doesn’t really change much… you can offer a tax deduction to wealthy donors. Most people aren’t that wealthy and don’t care about tax deductions.
You can’t conduct business and not pay income tax on it (that’s Unrelated Business Income, which the article talked about). All you can do is collect donations, grants, etc. and then use that to further your organisation’s purpose.
I would love to see lots of nonprofits organised which have philosophical/political conversations at a local coffee shop once a week!
For example Texas once had a sales tax exemption for periodicals sold by churches that consisted solely of material to promulgate their faith, and the Supreme Court in Texas Monthly v. Bullock, 489 US 1 (1989) [1] said that such an exemption violated the establishment clause.
In Swaggart Ministries v. Cal. Bd. of Equalization, 493 US 378 (1990) [2] Swaggart contended that California's subjecting them to sales/use tax was unconstitutional. The Court said it wasn't.
[1] https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-supreme-court/489/1.htm...
[2] https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-supreme-court/493/378.h...
This discussion is about taxing churches/religious organizations in general on all revenue/income (ie. tithe, donations, membership fees, etc). That would very likely be unconstitutional, as that would limit the organization's ability to assemble and practice religion.
If you’re interested in knowing where your federal tax dollars are going, put your numbers in and take a look. It’s possible this is the most productive thing Intuit has ever done.
Because churhces are exempt from all the transparency required of normal nonprofits, they can easily mislead their congregations about how that donated money is spent.
If someone decides to switch churches because they found out that most of the money they donated was not actually going towards charitable causes, that would be an absolute win in my book.
You're describing maybe a dozen or less mega-churches - not the thousands and thousands of typical churches.
If they don't want their congregations to know how much they spent building a giant mall or buying private jets, then they can choose to pay taxes instead. If you don't think your congregation will care about the private jets, then by all means, keep your tax exempt status.
Congress is authority-exempt from making laws that can apply taxes to them in the first place.
It's not like we tax everyone, then exempt religious organizations; the "everyone" that is able to be taxed does not include establishments of religion in the first place, thanks to the wording of 1A.