NON-PROFIT TAX EXEMPTION

No, he's stating the truth: churches SHOULD be taxed as they are a
> business. After all, why should others be forced to subsidize any > church? Granting churches tax free status means that the government is > supporting them... If this is 'right' then I'm starting my own religion..=

The usual argument that Church people make is that all of the money put into a Church was already taxed, when the church members earned it, so that taxing it again would be seen as double taxation.

Why pick on churches and not the huge corporations who pay many THOUSANDS of so-called professionals full going salaries and more?

Lutheran Social Services is the largest employer of social workers in the world, paying them all as if they were professionals even if they are not licensed social workers.

The chain of command (management pyramid) gets paid six figure incomes.

The CEO makes big bucks.

Yet the whole shebang can be a ""NON-PROFIT"".

In most larger communities there are DOZENS of ""NON-PROFITS"" spun off from the government social services agencies, often contracting with the government social services agencies.

The ones I am talking about are NOT what you could call charitable organizations. Not in the least.

Again, considerable numbers of people get somewhat large paychecks for doing what they loosely call "work".

I see the social work and social services NON-PROFITS as bigger legalized tax fraud than churches.

I think tax exemption should be reserved for true charities, not companies with massive PAYROLLS.

Imagine owning a business space in a large city but located between three or four HUGE church buildings.

The property tax burden in that area would all be shifted away from the HUGE churches and to the property owners amid/amongst/near them.

I was involved in a discussion like this once many years ago and somebody actually tried to justify all churches as if they are charitable institutions.

I pointed out that for most churches that is NOT their primary goal and that for some of the HUGE churches, the huge cost of building maintenance alone per year is more than what is spent toward feeding the poor, etc.

A man who was antagonistic to me, but who was a church board member, backed me up on that.

Interestingly, there ARE a few churches who are HEAVILY into charity work like feeding the poor and do NOT maintain monumental buildings.

I can think of only one situation worse for the tax base than lots of real estate that is tax exempt, and that is where the government ITSELF owns the real estate!

Cedar Rapids Iowa has whole residential neighborhoods that were destroyed by the

2008 floods and will mostly become park land.

Some homes are in areas so likely to flood again that this makes sense, but others are further up and would be more reasonable to repair, but between the idiocy of government and the idiocy of banks, we now have whole neighborhoods of gutted homes that are sitting without resolution.

Because of the use of federal money, there is a federal restriction that any developer/builder who buys one of them from the city must not PROFIT by more than 10% from the purchase.

So the city sits with THOUSANDS of repairable homes and gets almost no developers interested because of course they expect that after going to all that trouble, they should make real money.

Contractors who mess with this have figured out how to hire their relatives and friends, pay them the maximum going rate, and charging up the wazoo for any work they do, to offset any ""profit"" from the actual sale after repair.

Some landlords are buying up the better gutted homes to repair and then rent out for many years.