Does anyone else think it's time to tax the churches?

[dreamnightwind]

114. Great post

I hope you get some traction with that.

Out where I live, in a redwood area that many use for vacations, there are a number of large resorts (my word) that have massive infrastructure on them. When I was a kid I went to one of them for our school week-long field trip. Now, the one I went to as a child and pretty much all of the others are owned by large, out-of-the-area churches. I'm assuming they pay no property taxes on them, and our local governments are absolutely starved for revenue.

Also, I recently went to a family wedding in Texas, a church wedding. I'd never seen such a church (I don't go to church, went as a kid but those churches were tiny fundy bare-bones operations). They had incredible facilities, including a full-size, fully outfitted basketball arena, unbelievable. The cost of this must have been enormous. Anyway, they are able to attract members and recruit people to their beliefs using access to those amazing facilities as incentive. There's something very wrong about that, especially since I'm assuming that none of this was ever taxed. It's a heavily right-wing operation that complains about not being able to explicitly advocate for political candidates from their church, they think that's unfair. I think they should be taxed like everything else is taxed, and they can do whatever they want politically.

Anyway, I applaud your efforts to at least get some real valuation on these properties, good luck with that, and let us know if you get your website happening.