real life wrote:Are you also in favor of taxing all other (currently) tax free entities? Other tax free entities (universities , for instance) are BIG business too, and probably dwarf the churches in their locality in comparison.
Large universites, those which would qualify as "big business," are almost all of them entities supported by state government, whose educational budgets are heavily subsidized by Federal revenues. Do you suggest that the state and Federal governments ought, in effect, to tax themselves? What few other large universities are not state-supported? Harvard, Columbia, Nortre Dame? The last named, of course, would be taxed under the previously proposed scheme as being part of the Catholic church. The two former institutions would have little problem securing the services of tax lawyers who could whittle their liabilites down to meaningless pittances. The likely effect of such a program would be to bankrupt small liberal arts colleges, which would include a host of conservative institutions affiliated with various religious sects. Your proposal makes little sense.
If churches were subject to taxation, either they would be taxed on the basis of extensive real estate and/or investment holdings, which would make them liable in the ordinary way of private organizations with substantial means, or they could be shown to be operating below the line of taxation, if not actually at a loss. It is hardly unreasonable to exempt the physical manifestations of certain groups preferred superstitions from taxation just because of the nature of the fervor with which those superstitions are adhered to.
