You might be a Democrat if...

What they don't tell you is that if you tax churches,
you tax church members an extra 1 million
dollars every 7 minutes and 30 seconds beyond
the taxes they already pay. And the church member
has to pay the extra tax, just for believing in something
that progressives don't (God in case you missed that).

THE CRY HAS NOW GONE UP: CHURCHES SHOULD BE TAXED!

So, dear friends, are you saying the government should take 30 to 40% of my tithe and offerings so the government can take over the charitable things that my church does and somehow that's going to work out a lot better for us all?  Not to mention that the government will also use that tax money they take from my tithes and offerings to blow up things, to pay useless bureaucrats exhorbitant salaries to sit in cubicles generating paperwork for each other and interfering with small business, to build roads to nowhere and to imprison people in large numbers.

So you're okay with the church being able to afford 30% fewer pastors and teachers, 30% fewer missions, mission doctors and mission workers, 30% fewer schools and 30% fewer hospitals for the church? 

And that's if the tax rate stays that low. Anyone realize what the tax rate has been under previous Democrat administrations.  Would you believe 70%?  How about 90%.  The tax rate has got that high under the Dems. Is there anybody you believe should give back 90% of what he or she earns by their own efforts?  Does anyone really think that taking that much away from people who create jobs is a good idea?

If you do, you might be a Democrat.

In the interest of equal time, here's ten reason why churches should be taxed.  My favorite is this one:

To exempt churches from taxation unfairly restricts the ability of other social elements that deserve to progress, and thereby goes against what the government was built to do in the first place.

There's an argument that presumes churches don't deserve to progress. He earlier says "Churches don't exist primarily to provide for the citizen; the government does." Anybody else see where we're going. In the typical satanic (yeah I went there) propoganda ploy you lead with an assumption that is false, but which you say is true and then, hoping they'll take your word for it that the first thing is true, you go on to tell the untruth you want them to swallow. In this case, the untruth is that we should give all our money to someone who will take care of us; in fact that someone else gives us our rights and benefits, rather than that we ourselves earn those rights and benefits.  I'd maintain that government exists, not to grant us rights and benefits, but to protect citizens from eternal busybodies who want to always be telling others what to do and restricting our rights and privileges. The whole point of the revolution that created the United States was that we didn't want other people to be meddling in our business all the time.

This ain't how Robin Hood worked.
He actually took from the tax collectors
and gave the money back to the taxpayers.
Obama Hood? Not so much....

The great fallacy in the reasoning that not taxing churches is stealing from taxpayers is that there is an underlying assumption that the government owns all the money and gives it back to us in order to take care of us. It follows under this line of reasoning that, if the government can't take it from churches, then they can't give it to "taxpayers" so that's somehow cheating "taxpayers". If you missed the subtle little problem here, they are calling us tax PAYERS and yet casting the argument as though we were tax "getters". In other words they assume we all agree that government works like this. They TAKE money from you the taxpayer (since the government owned all your money anyway) and leave you a little to muddle by on. Then, the government decides what to do with the money they took from you and they may (or may not) give you some of it back if the government approves of whatever you are doing.  I wrote government grants for more than 20 years. They're very picky about who they give money back to and if they don't like what you are doing, they won't give you any.

Now under the "churches ought to be taxed" scheme, if you are a Christian, for instance, and you give 10-20% of your income to the church and the government TAKES that money through taxation, then you are being effectively charged an indirect luxury tax for the privilege of giving money to your church! You were already taxed once on all the money you kept. Then, you would be taxed on the money you give for God's work also. Now atheists or non-churchy progressives get to keep that 10-20% of their income to use to buy themselves beer and skittles. So, if we're arguing about fairness, I think it's danged unfair that Bob the Progressive gets to not only keep more of his income for his own self-gratification, but that I also have to pay a tax on whatever I do not keep for myself, but give to help my church do its charitable works, thus saving the government money that Bob thinks it needs to spend on said charitable works.

In the real world, Bob the Progressive should not get to tell me whether or not what I freely give to my church is worthwhile or not. He doesn't get to say whether or not my religion is useless and should be taxed. Bob the Progressive is proposing a sort of a luxury tax for people being religious and he's obviously doing it because he doesn't approve of religion and taxing churches he hopes will punish them and decrease their power. King George III would have like to shut up a few American pastors too as I recall.

The right to the free exercise of religion is enshrined in the Constitution. You don't get to meddle with it just so you can save on your own taxes or get yourself some more government goodies. It doesn't work that way.

Check out the 10 reasons churches should be taxed, but only if you've taken your blood pressure meds this morning. It's a rare, honest peek inside the plans of the progressive left for religion in America.  How many false assumptions can you count?

© 2015 by Tom King

Is Anybody Really Surprised the IRS Targets People for Political Purposes?

http://www.breitbart.com

The American public isn't really shocked by the Congressional hearings regarding the IRS targeting conservative groups. We've all suspected that the IRS has been targeting people for a long time. It's not even surprising the White House is involved What's the real surprise is that they got caught at it.  Who would have thought that anyone would have guts enough to actually stand up to the IRS and cry "Foul!"?

I guess that's what happens when you go after people who already hate the IRS, then you waste their time, burn up their resources, cost them money, give their political opponents preferential treatment, cover it up till after the election.......

.............AND STICK THEM WITH FOUR MORE YEARS OF PRESIDENT OBAMA!

Straw that broke the camel's back. Coulda' seen that coming.

Tom King - (c) 2013

The IRS Thinks Something's Sinister at the Tea Party?

Media pundits, political operatives and the Obama Adminstration keep trying to "discover" something sinister going on with the Tea Party. Now the Nonprofit Quarterly's Rick Cohen gets into the act, reporting gleefully that the IRS is going after the Tea Party.

First, there is not a "Tea Party" so far as a national organizations goes. The Tea Party is a loose collection of individuals who share a desire for smaller, less intrusive government (not nonexistent government as Mr. Cohen snarkily suggests). Many Tea Parties are only organized in the sense that some guy made T-shirts and we all bought them with our own money and showed up at a park to rally for a specific candidate. We communicate by bulletin boards and websites that some of us donate money to in order to pay for the hosting charges.

NPQ's Cohen is rather tickled that the IRS is going after the Tea Party.  The IRS is going to be monumentally disappointed after it spends all that money trying to find out where the Tea Party is making money off the Koch brothers or whatever conservative bugbear they and the left believes is funding the whole thing. The administration and its allies on the left can't seem to imagine that regular raggedy people like me would care about politics without being paid to.

I spent 30 years in the nonprofit industry helping raise millions of dolllars for small nonprofits that couldn't afford to pay me to do it. I was always the development director AND something else that took up most of my time. And there's a reason they called those agencies "nonprofit". I'm 57 and have no retirement, no savings, no home and no health insurance. If I get sick I either pay for it or die and that's okay by me because I chose to do what I did. I worked with seriously troubled kids, many with disabilities on top of abuse and mental illness, adults with physical, mental and developmental disabilities, seniors with age-related disabilities, preschoolers with learning disabilities and the 1 in 5 citizens in East Texas who cannot drive due to age or disability. I started an independent living center for people with disabilities. I worked for six months to write the grant, organize the board, raised nearly 2 million dollars and then gave the organization over to people with disabilities to run and walked away to work on transportation issues. I worked side by side with conservatives and liberals to create fair funding for transit across my state, testified before the state legislature and was warned to check under my car before starting it because I was messing with somebody's "deal".

And, largely because of what I saw in government and quasi-government agencies, I am a Tea Party Activist. I've never received a cent to show up at a rally nor has anyone I know of. We all pay our own way, make or buy our own signs and T-Shirts, volunteer to organize and bring food to rallies. How the hell is the IRS going to tax that. The Tea Party where I'm from only exists when a bunch of us come together to howl. The only real way you can tell what we think is to ask us and pollsters do.

We've learned a bit about community organizing from the left. We kept some parts and pitched the other, less savory bits. NGOs and government officials kept asking me what I was trying to get out of the transportation advocacy I was doing. I told them nothing, but they didn't believe me. They kept telling me I couldn't get any grant money. I kept telling them I didn't want any. I wanted fair funding for East Texas rural transit - two very political Democrat leaning district were taking 60-75% of all the rural transit dollars. My group took them on head-on. I was attacked verbally, reviled and appointed to the Public Transportation Advisory Committee for my state by the governor. We got the job done, but it was because we all worked together to do it - progressives and conservatives. We just had to figure out that we wanted the same things, only disagreed on how to do it. Once we figured out what we all wanted, it was easier to figure out how to get it.

When we were done, we didn't organize a nonprofit to do something we no longer needed done. We just let our legislature know we'd be back if they messed with East Texas again. It was my introduction to the kind of real community organizing that led to a Tea Party organizing in my neck of the woods.

My tea party associates help fund charitable organizations all over the region. They are neighbors, friends and decent people. I really resent the implication that there is something sinister going on with the Tea Party. I know well what they charge for helping the nonprofits I've worked with - $0. So, I do get a bit impatient with folk who complain because some mega-corporation's CEO gets a bonus that's bigger than their salary when they've chosen, of their own free will, to work for a nonprofit organization, knowing full well that it's a "nonprofit". I agree that the laborer deserves his hire, but to complain that they are not making what someone who has dedicated his life to making money is rather disingenuous.

The angst among left leaning politicians and career nonprofit managers over taxing the Tea Party reminds me of my Uncle Bob, who once borrowed his son's electric car. He called home from the gas station frustrated. "I've circled this thing have a dozen times and can't figure out where to stick the gas nozzle in."

The IRS is going to have the same devil of a time figuring out how to tax Tea Parties as the British did trying to find the "Indians" who threw all that tea into the bay.

(c) 2012 by Tom King