Your Tax Dollars at Work ... for Freakazoids

We've wondered for decades how much. Just how many millions - tens of millions - hundreds of millions of our hard-earned tax dollars do the deluded and the criminal of the freakazoids suck up every year? The motherfuckers keep it a pretty close secret, as well they should, as it's way fucking more than we imagined.

From Free Inquiry:

The home in the photo (above) is the $1.75 million mansion of the Reverend Randy White, the former head pastor of Without Walls International Church in Tampa, Florida. While some people may be bothered by the fact that there are pastors who live in multimillion dollar homes, this is old news to most. But here is what should bother you about these expensive homes: You are helping to pay for them! You pay for them indirectly, the same way local, state, and federal governments in the United States subsidize religion—to the tune of about $71 billion every year. SNIP

Table 1. Estimated annual government subsidy of religion per year

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.

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If these subsidies were removed - though we have no basis for believing that they will be anytime soon - we wonder what the damage to religion would be. There is evidence that donations to religions are tied to taxes; as the tax benefit of donating goes up, so do donations and vice versa.41 In other words, it seems likely that the removal of these subsidies would result in a substantial decrease in the supply of religion in the United States. To what extent it would affect demand for religion is uncertain.

For those individuals who argue that religions should receive subsidies because of their charitable work, there is an easy solution for that problem. If religions want to engage in charitable work, they should separate religious activities and finances from their charitable activities and finances. The charities run by religions could be tax-exempt, but the religious organizations would be treated like civic leagues or sports clubs or any other volunteer organization that exists for entertainment or the benefit of its members. Those groups are not tax-exempt and are not subsidized by the government.

What, then, can we conclude from these findings? First, we have avoided any discussion of the separation between church and state and the establishment of religion because these subsidies do fall under the protection of the First Amendment—they do not favor any one particular religion. They do, of course, favor religion over nonreligion, but, as noted above, we do not foresee the ending of these subsidies anytime soon. Second, it seems likely that subsidies are propping up religion in the United States, though to what extent is not clear. Certainly many religions that are near failing would have done so already if not for the subsidies they receive from the government. Another practical result of these subsidies is that religions are more affluent and more influential than they would otherwise be, because they have the resources to fund efforts to change legislation, create widely consumed media, and influence public policy.

There is also the question of whether the monies lost through these subsidies—assuming they could be collected by ending the subsidies—could be better spent, particularly by governments. We are ambivalent on that point, but we do agree with Barb Dempsey, the mayor of Mount Clemens, Michigan, who argued that religions should at least pay their fair share for services like fire protection, streetlights, police, and roads. They use those services just like other organizations do.

Finally, 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!

Read the whole horrifying thing.