Taxing churches just for being churches would be counter-productive. What needs to happen is the current set of rules regulating what counts as a church and what doesn’t needs to be tightened and enforced. There are tons of shit people running churches as their own personal profit machines and those need shut down. The Methodist churches built in every town in America, for example, are only barely hanging on by a thread and bring more good to their neighborhood than they do harm; their loss would be tragic.
We should do all that, but make no mistake, I’m not taxing churches because they’re churches, I’m taxing them because they are businesses, and most of them are actually money laundering operations disguised as churches.
So yeah, investigate which are real, and which are scams, but tax them ALL.
Taxing churches just for being churches would be counter-productive. What needs to happen is the current set of rules regulating what counts as a church and what doesn’t needs to be tightened and enforced. There are tons of shit people running churches as their own personal profit machines and those need shut down. The Methodist churches built in every town in America, for example, are only barely hanging on by a thread and bring more good to their neighborhood than they do harm; their loss would be tragic.
We should do all that, but make no mistake, I’m not taxing churches because they’re churches, I’m taxing them because they are businesses, and most of them are actually money laundering operations disguised as churches.
So yeah, investigate which are real, and which are scams, but tax them ALL.