What is galling about the charitable contribution deduction is that it is
a HUGE government subsidy to religion, and most of those dollars are NOT being spent on charity. One look at most churches' budgets will reveal that a very small percentage of their budgets is ever spent on feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, taking care of the homeless, taking care of the sick, etc.
Every time a charitable contribution deduction is taken for a gift to a church, the government loses dollars to the church. And, what is even more galling is that many of the churches that benefit from that government subsidy spend their time politicking.
I dare say that if the government had all the tax revenue lost to the church through the years that we might not have a deficit. That figure would be interesting to know. The Mormon Church, in effect, got $300,000 this year alone, from the government, because of Romney claiming more than 2 million dollars in in "charitable contributions." Multiply that by how many times, to see how much government subsidizes religion?
To all the religious organizations that want to insert themselves into politcs, I say "fine, just as long as you give up your tax-exempt status. Until you do that, SHUT THE FUCK UP about politics."
= new reply since forum marked as read
The outrageous subsidies to religion in America
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So what does this add up to? The chart below gives the estimates of government subsidies to religion, which the authors consider conservative—especially because they couldn’t estimate several subsidies. The bottom line is that the U.S. government, i.e., the U.S. taxpayer, subsidizes religion to the tune of at least $71 billion per year!
<snip>
To put this into perspective, the combined total of government subsidies to agriculture in the United States in 2009 was estimated to be $180.8 billion. Religions receive at least 40 percent of the subsidy that agriculture does in the United States. Another way to illustrate the size of the subsidy may be to illustrate how much tax revenue would increase at the state level if religious institutions had to pay property taxes. In Florida, where the state government’s budget was $69.1 billion in 2011, the amount of tax revenue lost from subsidizing religious property was $2.2 billion or 3 percent of the state budget. The additional revenue would have mostly prevented the $1.1 billion cut to firefighter and police retirement plans and the $1.3 billion cut to public schools.
More:
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/08/10/the-outrageous-subsidies-to-religion-in-america/
I'm love'n these rateyes posts!
