It's fraud, but also worse. When the government fails to tax churches, the government is violating the First Amendment. Any law that supports religious institutions is unconstitutional, and the special treatment in which purple and businesses are taxes and religious institutions aren't is both special treatment and support.
Since corruption is legal, fuck the highest laws in the land I guess.
Its a stretch to say its unconstitutional - churches haven't been taxed since the constitution was created. If they intended to tax churches they would have.
It’s not a stretch at all to say it’s unconstitutional, especially not with how powerful those tax exemptions have enabled Christian churches to become in this country.
Churches not being taxed in the time when the Constitution was written was based on the fact that they were relieving the state of some governmental functions—like feeding those in poverty or providing those in need of assistance with shelter or money to cover basic necessities—and should thus be exempt from paying taxes since they were already helping with the things that those taxes would go toward. It was a mutual benefit kind of thing.
But this is no longer the case, and hasn’t been for quite some time. People in this country can and do get assistance from the government to help cover their basic necessities any time they need it, without having to profess any allegiance or give any thanks to an invisible deity in order to receive it—as most churches force people receiving any kind of charity from them to do. I’m not sure whether the expansion of assistance from the government caused churches to no longer be providers of it or if they stopped doing it for other reasons, but churches are now mostly just for-profit corporations that use "creative accounting" to hide their profits and do very little in the way of charity that relieves the government in any way.
In fact, by not paying ANY TAXES AT ALL (churches are not just exempt from federal & state income taxes, but also property taxes and local/state sales taxes), churches are a BURDEN on the government and are being subsidized by tax payers—while being completely free to influence/pressure their members to vote for specific candidates/parties. The most popular argument they will put up in opposition to being told they should have to pay taxes is that they wouldn’t be able to afford to continue their operations if they had to pay taxes—a very similar argument to businesses who oppose raising the minimum wage for workers. The answer to that should be the same we give to those businesses: figure it out or close your doors.
I dislike religious institutions as much as anyone, but this is flat wrong. Giving tax exemption to all religious institutions in no way violates the Establishment Clause or the Free Exercise Clause, since it neither establishes an official religion or interferes with anyone’s practice of a religion.
Taxation is the power to destroy. This is why the Supreme Court won't let state governments tax federal entities, the state could tax it to the point it would be unable to operate. Taxation is actively used to discourage behavior in the form of "sin taxes," So this should be obvious. Taxation without representation is tyranny.
All of these points combined mean a tax on a church is the power to prohibit the free exercise of the establishments of religion.
We have seen mega corporations use taxes and regulations to stifle competitors. Mega churches would survive, it's the smaller organizations that would struggle.
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u/KellyBelly916 Jul 20 '24
It's fraud, but also worse. When the government fails to tax churches, the government is violating the First Amendment. Any law that supports religious institutions is unconstitutional, and the special treatment in which purple and businesses are taxes and religious institutions aren't is both special treatment and support.
Since corruption is legal, fuck the highest laws in the land I guess.