The USA loses 71 Billion Dollars a Year From Tax Exemptions of Churches

....as the perceived “benefit” to society of religions becomes increasingly irrelevant as more and more Americans cease to utilize their “services” by disaffiliating, it will also be increasingly unfair for a large percentage of nonreligious Americans (almost 40 percent in some states) to subsidize the recreational activities of others. These subsidies should be phased out. But since that is unlikely to happen, we’d accept the following alternative: the ability to write off our annual entertainment expenses as “donations”; the subsidizing of all of our housing expenses, including utilities and maintenance costs; being exempt from paying taxes on businesses we start related to our primary purpose in life (say, a micro-brewery); direct cash transfers to us from the government for trying to convert people to our worldviews while claiming to provide social services; and, most important, the right to host games of bingo without reporting our income as gambling revenue!

http%3A//www.secularhumanism.org/index.php%3Fsection%3Dfi%26page%3Dcragun_32_4



• OP, do you know if other countries have similar tax exemptions for churches or is this just a feature of the US tax code? Just wondering…

• Same could be said of welfare queens and AIDS boys. Why should we subsidize any of this?

• The government spent about $59 billion to pay for traditional social welfare programs like food stamps and housing assistance in 2006.. ...... meanwhile Uncle Sam doled out ...$92 billion... in assistance to corporations during the same year!

• FF R2!!

• It's pretty obvious, from the article, that the religious hate groups are taking serious advantage of cheating the usa out of tax dollars.

• "Same could be said of welfare queens and AIDS boys. Why should we subsidize any of this?" Because people on welfare and people with HIV need our help and religious institutions often have billions of dollars at their disposal. But you knew that.

• Tax them!!