Taxing mega churches
- Thread starter Jazzy
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If they all get paid well, why not, but only let big rich churches pay taxes. It can't be that everyone works for free and can never get a cent because it goes to the govt. Well it can be, but it's annoying and makes ppl quit.
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A few problems with the thought.
Firstly, you'd have to objectively define "mega church".
Secondly you'd need to have some kind of sliding scale so you didn't have a situation where churches were encouraged to expel members because having 10,001 members subjects them to heavy taxation but having 9,999 members would free them from it. If it were based purely on income, the chances are the threshold would be high enough that it would be easy to simply spin off an associated non-profit and split contributions between the two. That would leave the monstrously big churches split into two huge churches, while the burdens would land on those not big enough to play games with the system.
Thirdly, and relating to taxation in general, it gets pretty stupid when the government expects to take a slice out of just about everything. If the giver gets a tax break based on the church's non-profit status then it's reasonable to make sure the church is actually a non-profit. If people are worried about "mega churches" (whatever the term is taken to mean in their context) it would seem to make more sense to check just what non-profits are doing in general rather than focusing on churches of a particular size.
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Two problems I see are: 1) if any church is taxed (and the tax would be substantial, I'd guess, since this is a mega church we're talking about), next will come the effort to tax all churches; and 2) the power to tax is the power to destroy, so there will be at least some people in government who would like to drive religion in general out of society, and this change, if approved, would be a windfall for them.
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The same as that of taxes little churches....
The USA as a long history of generally not taxing not-for-profits. Now if they start taxing not-for-profit hospitals, schools/colleges, boy and girl scouts, AA, and other non-profits... and decided to not exempt any, they I suppose they'd need to tax churches. But I hope they don't. Of course, such would have no impact on local, state and national income taxes (if there's no income, there's no income taxes) but it does impact property taxes and some others.
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Why not tax the federal government? They take in TRILLIONS of dollars in income every year!
Even if every state taxed the feds only say 1%, why there would be no need for the local or state governments to tax at all! No sales taxes, no property taxes, no business tax, no school taxes, state income taxes.... we'd just tax the Federal Government on all it's income! It is - by far - the RICHEST entity in the entire world! Tax it just 1% and we'd eliminate all other taxes, that much from the Feds to each state would cover everything. The Federal government thinks taxes are GREAT! It thinks the wealthy should pay up! So, let's let it pay up.
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Even if every state taxed the feds only say 1%, why there would be no need for the local or state governments to tax at all! No sales taxes, no property taxes, no business tax, no school taxes, state income taxes.... we'd just tax the Federal Government on all it's income! It is - by far - the RICHEST entity in the entire world! Tax it just 1% and we'd eliminate all other taxes, that much from the Feds to each state would cover everything. The Federal government thinks taxes are GREAT! It thinks the wealthy should pay up! So, let's let it pay up.
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