Wednesday, April 30, 2014

A possible source of badly needed revenue?

Separation of church and state is a hotly contested topic these days, especially among the religious right, who like to claim there is no separation when it involves them or someone they support placing some iconography in a public place, and, conversely, that there is separation when it comes to things like tax-exempt status and campaigning from the pulpit, which happens quite often. But here's something else to consider. 

If you account for all the religious denominations that have churches in the United States, all faiths represented by a brick-and-mortar facility, you'd arrive at the number, 350,000, according to Hartford Institute for Religion Research and the 2010 Religion Census report. This includes churches, temples, synagogues, etc.; effectively all places of worship that took part in the census, so this number might actually be higher. 

What if each of these churches paid, on average, just $2,000 in property tax? This really is not much. We pay more than twice this amount for two modest Michigan properties; however, consider how many churches in your town sit on large tracts of open land. The $2,000 figure represents the national average according to what I could discover, and this amount would generate $700,000,000 in tax revenue were all US churches taxed. While this doesn't seem like much considering how much money the US Government takes in every year, it's nothing to sneeze at either, and it would probably be far more depending on the size of the properties and their resulting appraised values. 

If there is no separation, as so many of these denominations like to claim, especially by their politically motivated actions, then why shouldn't they pay for the property on which their churches, temples, and synagogues sit? Clearly, these organizations do benefit from what everyone else is paying for, from what everyone else who owns property in the US has to pay.

No comments: