A modest deficit reduction proposal

With the United States government just a couple of weeks away from insolvency with no serious plans that have good chances of passing both chambers and the president's veto, I think it's about time to think about looking for revenue from the people who have ridden on the backs of working people the longest: tax-exempt churches. I think that we have many good reasons to make the 501(c) charitable tax exemption only available to charities; if we as a society are going to assume the shared burden of subsidizing an organization in the form of a tax exemption, which either increases the costs or decreases the services for all of us, then we had better hope that we are all getting something back from that organization.

For example, a charity like Amnesty International provides services that benefit everyone- they help to oversee the transfer of donated money and goods to sudden and long-term disaster areas so that the government doesn't have to and you don't have to either. On the other hand, your local Southern Baptist church with a congregation of fifty probably does nothing but increase traffic on Sundays and make life difficult for your homosexual friends and neighbors. Your local Jehovah's Witness church is sapping people from the pool of possible blood donors. Your Mormon church is sending its wealthiest spenders overseas to spend their money in foreign countries on the futile quest to evangelize a 19th-century fraud. And your local Catholic Church is collecting tax-free donations to be funneled into to sex abuse apology fund for when it inevitably loses its next lawsuit.

We can not afford this kind of wanton waste any longer from these parasitic institutions that provide nothing and take plenty. What's best about my proposal is that, for those few churches that actually do some of the charitable things as a regular part of their operations like the scriptures they're so loudmouthed about tell them to do, they can still be tax exempt- just like any other charity that applies and meets the criteria.

Some people might say that it's actually "most" tax-exempt churches that do charitable good deeds. Firstly, the IRS disagrees. Here's the list of what it takes to become a tax-exempt church, and please stop me when you find something of charity-like good to the community on the list:

• Distinct legal existence
• Recognized form of creed and worship
• Definite and distinct ecclesiastical government
• Formal code of doctrine and discipline
• Distinct religious history
• Membership not associated with any other church or organization
• Organization of ordained ministers
• Established places of worship
• Literature of its own
• Ordained ministers selected after completing prescribed courses of studies
• Regular congregations
• Regular religious services
• Sunday schools for religious instruction of the young
• Schools for preparation of ministers

Please, I ask you, highlight to me in the comments which item on this list suggests that the churches that become tax-exempt must be charitable. But most are anyway, you say? Then there's no problem- they can apply to become 501(c) charities on the merits of those good works, then, and the only churches that will be cut from the exemptions are the (I'm very very small minority) number of churches that only do, say, a few charitable events or collections a year, like my workplace and many workplaces and indeed most private residences do. If the twice-a-year food pantry volunteer church group is enough for an exemption, though, then we'd have to tax exempt every business and every person who does this. No, we need more from these parasitic institutions, or we should give them less.

It isn't just that these churches usually don't do enough charity to be worth the money we give them as subsidies, its also that what they call charity is... not charitable. If you give money to help fund a box of Bibles, or better yet a plane full of missionaries, to starving Africans (a process that worked so well for Uganda that the religious right is still apologizing for it), no taxes on your donation, and no taxes on the church's spending it. But if you buy a box of canned soup to send overseas, you still pay taxes on those goods, and the grocery store still pays taxes on its sales, and their employees still pay taxes on their wages.

The radical inequality between churches and regular Americans in this regard has become so bad that some Christians are even calling on their own churches to voluntarily forfeit their charitable statuses as itself a form of charity, and I agree. Because it isn't just your local Southern Baptist church that's exempt. The Hartford Institute estimates that there are almost 1,500 "megachurches" in the United States that, in 2008, averaged $6.5 million dollars in income each. That's almost a hundred billion dollars in income from megachurches alone that is going untaxed, which doesn't even include the revenues they draw from their subsidiaries' product lines, like courses, books, or music.

And this data doesn't even include non-church subsidiaries that still qualify as "religious," which includes everything from anti-gay religious evangelism organizations like Campus Crusade for Christ ($512 million in untaxed income last year, untaxed salaries up to $85,000) to massive propaganda publishing house LifeWay, which sells "products" out of 160 "stores" nationwide yet pays no taxes on any of its business, or on the DVD entertainment line it sells, or from the secondary publishing house that it owns, which also sells "products" out of "stores," all tax-free.

But as for how precisely much money we're losing in total, we'll never know- religious organizations specifically are exempted by the IRS from having to fill out Form 990. But just on the numbers for massive organizations like Campus Crusade (whose income I only know because they voluntarily disclose it on their website- no religious organization has to, though non-religious charities do have to fill out Form 990) plus megachurches, there is over a trillion dollars in income going untaxed. That says nothing about their employees who pay no wage taxes or their products that are charged no sales taxes.

Perhaps now you understand why I thought that Senator Grassley's 2007 attempt to requisition financial records from six colossal, multi-acre multi-site megachurches in order to see if they were abiding by the terms of their tax subsidies was a good idea- it's four years later, and nothing came of Grassley's quietly-closed inquiry. It's time for that to change, especially now, when the Republicans are looking to slash benefits to the elderly, the retired, the disabled, the veteran, when there are so many of these megamillionaire parasites on our backs when there don't have to be. It won't solve the debt problem. It might amount to a drop in the bucket. But we need every drop, and it will only make things better for churches and for Americans.

In short, here are the pros of abolishing the automatic subsidy for religious institutions:

• We encourage existing churches to behave at least as charitably as their scriptures require them to be, so that they can qualify for normal 501(c) charitable exemption.
• We penalize churches that do nothing but accumulate wealth for their own expansion by treating them like what they are- businesses.
• We bring more money to states and the federal government to compensate for the services that churches use.
• We fulfill our legal obligations to the Constitution by stopping a needless federal entanglement with religious institutions, which requires them to favor religious institutions over others for no secular purpose, and which requires the government to unconstitutionally inquire into such things as the doctrines and ecclesiastical governments of churches.
• We ensure that congregants are aware of whether their money is going to a charity or a business, since many churches masquerade as one while acting as the other.