Do We Need a Law to Force Grocery Stores to Stop Throwing Away Food

In America, you have no excuse for being hungry.

Short Answer:  Nope!

Ever once in a while, some dear lefty buddy of mine will throw a post up on Facebook about a clever way that France (why is it always France) has passed a law making it illegal for grocery stores to throw away food. It feeds the hungry and stops global warming they say, thus killing two virtual birds with one stone. It seems that decomposing food releases carbon into the air much to the dismay of environmentalists and the joy of plants everywhere who need carbon to breathe.

Well, it's true that France passed such a law back in 2016. The law made it illegal for any grocery store larger than 4000 square feet to throw away food that is getting close to its sell-by date. On the surface, it all sounds like a nifty idea and even punishes those greedy corporate grocery chains.

The law requires stores to stop tossing useful nutritious, if slightly aged food. Instead, they would have to donate it to some charitable nonprofit that would hand the food out to the deserving poor and hungry while making sure only the people getting it actually need it.

And like any good law, the mechanics of it is fraught with unintended consequences. It makes the supermarket responsible for sorting and shipping out the food which adds to the cost. There is some concern that if the poor don't buy food, the grocery store will lose money from even that small amount of lost business. Remember that of all retail, grocers operate on a very narrow margin, earning, after expenses from 1 to 3 cents on every dollar they spend.

Don't get me started on the economics of making this idea a government program. My friend Mark Milliorn has done an excellent explanation of the economic chaos caused by getting government involved in this scheme. There's one reason not to do this that Mark missed. 

AMERICANS ALREADY DO EXACTLY THIS SAME THING WITHOUT A LAW FORCING THEM TO DO IT. And we do it efficiently without wrecking the economy and we insure that no one goes hungry. The surest way to mess it all up is to make it a government program. 

I worked in East Texas for close to 4 decades, helped start 5 nonprofit organizations to fill community needs that weren't being met by government programs. One in 5 East Texans didn't have ready access to transportation. One in four were seniors or disabled adults. I helped write community collaborative grants for homeless programs and agencies. And I helped raise funds for food bank programs.

The East Texas Food Bank was a huge project. ETFB operated a large warehouse as a distribution point for the East Texas Food Bank programs in the region. Several grocery stores and chains donated food being rotated off the shelves to the food bank. It was carried to the ETFB warehouse in the store's trucks and by the food banks vehicles. Volunteers from all over come in and donate their time to sort the food onto pallets, where it is labeled and stored. 

A local church school's kids
volunteer time at the Food Bank

Across the region community organizations, nonprofits and churches set up food banks in their facilities. Sometimes several churches cooperate to set up a food bank location. They buy shelves and coolers and freezers from a company that resells and recycles store appliances.  The individual location sets up a room like a store. When someone comes in needing groceries, church secretaries or volunteers give them a basket and lets them shop for what they need. The bank staff know what's available and help to distribute it fairly.

The program was particularly successful during economic hard times. People would need food to time them over till they started work. So instead of going through the Food Stamp Offices' proctological exam, they pick up a couple of bags of groceries at the church food bank. Other ways food is distributed is through outdoor distributions in parks and public facilities, through soup kitchens, nonprofit residential facilities, and Meals on Wheels.

The upshot was that one day panicked Food Stamp officials summoned us all to a meeting where they announced that the feds were cutting $800,000 from their budget.  AND IT WAS OUR FAULT THEY CLAIMED. Apparently, we did so well with the food banks that their applications dropped significantly and DC cut their budget. They were planning to spend $150,000 on a marketing campaign, the theme of which was "Food Stamps are not part of welfare reform."

It was then that I discovered where they got the "One in five children go to bed hungry" slogan. The spokesman for the Food Stamp office let it slip out that their applications were way down. I asked if they were going to make the application process easier and was told "NO!" It was then that the I found that the 1-in-5 hunger statistic was based on the number of applications, not the number of food stamp awards. What they really wanted was more applications. 

Our little church/nonprofit-based food banks would pick up truckloads of food at the central bank. We would pay 1 cent per pound to help cover the food bank's operating costs. The system runs entirely without state or federal government assistance. The grocery stores donate to the central food bank without being coerced by government. Other independent nonprofit volunteers from organizations like Gleaners whose volunteers harvest fields gleaning potatoes, yams, carrots and other crops after the farmers do the first pass, also donate harvested produce and overflow stuff from festivals and fairs. 

The system works smoothly and doesn't get mucked up by government bureaucrats. And nobody knows who needs food like church secretaries and the field staffs of community organizations. 

So if the government can keep its grubby hands off of us, we can make sure the greatest health threat to Americans in poverty is obesity and we can do it efficiently and economically.

Americans are good people by nature; Christians are under orders to be good people. We give more money to charity, to third world countries and the poor than the US government does.

© 2023 by Tom King                                                 

 

 

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

Muzzling Pastors With the IRS

Should the IRS tax churches that engage in politics?

Rick Cohen in a recent Nonprofit Quarterly piece, suggested that allowing pastors to endorse political candidates or speak out on political issues is somehow bad for the nonprofit sector and that churches that engaged in political speech were somehow at odds with the constitution.  I respectfully disagree. 

Every nonprofit lobbies for their party (usually Democrat) in some way. Whether they call it "educating the public" or "informing our representatives", it's obvious which political camp any given nonprofit 501(c)3 is sitting in.

Churches are not strictly in the same category as the mainstream 501(c)3.  Churches are, in fact, a unique segment of the nonprofit sector, protected four ways in the Bill of Rights - freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion and freedom of the press (should they have one). Historically, churches have always been a factor in political activity in America. During the Civil War, it was largely church folk that pressured Lincoln to make the war about ending slavery. Powerful speakers rose in pulpits across the land (even a few brave souls in the South did) to call for the end to the pernicious institution. The Revolutionary War was practically organized in church houses across the country. If the IRS had taken this attitude during the 50s and 60s, Dr. Martin Luther King would have had some difficulty fighting for Civil Rights.  Remember, Dr. King was a preacher.  And it was church people that forced the Congress to take up the issue of Civil Rights - both black and white church people exercising their rights of free speech and assembly.  Churches were burned and bombed, but they stood firm.

And the desire to muzzle political in churches, I have noticed is never applied to liberal pastors like Rev. Jesse Jackson or Rev. Al Sharpton who both speak wherever they want to and have, so far, not left a trail of tax-paying churches in their wake.

Freedom of Religion is not Freedom From Religion. As unions, political parties and advocacy groups speak for workers, population groups and people of various political persuasions, so churches speak for the members of their congregations. To muzzle pastors is absolutely unconscionable. It is to silence people because of their creed and we would certainly not condone silencing people because of their race or color.
Churches are in no way profit-making enterprises. When naughty pastors misuse church funds they should be arrested and thrown in jail and taxed. I know of few Christians who would object to that. When churches profiteer off their members, they should be investigated and taxed like all git-out! BUT to muzzle this country's clergy for instructing their congregations regarding things political is unconscionable and deprives the political process of a key element of decision-making - a conscience.

This attack on churches through taxation is little more than an attack on religion itself.  Like the so-called gay marriage initiatives, the quashing of religious political speech is little more than a thinly veiled attack on the Christian faith itself.  It is all about misusing the "fairness" argument to make the case for forcing institutions of faith out of the public square and back behind the church's closed doors.

From there it is but a short step to forcing the church underground and out of the public eye altogether, as though it were some sort of perversion rather than an expression of faith and belief.

Perhaps we should change the designation of churches to separate them from nonprofits that accept federal and state grants. If churches accept government money, then fine, they need to shut up about politics. BUT so long as a church operates as a religious institution and is in fact, not for profit, operates ethically and accepts no support from the government, then by all that's holy let them speak up and say what they will.

Labor Unions are tax exempt, although donations or payments to a union are not tax exempt.  But then that makes sense.  Unions are designed specifically to enrich their members by brokering deals with employers for better pay and benefits.  While church donations are exempt from taxation, their purpose is not to enrich their members.  Church members don't strike against God or the government for better pay, for instance.

Unions are essentially profit-making entities. They earn raises and benefits for their members. that is their chief purpose. That's a whole different story from churches.

Churches, just like unions serve as a critical voice for their people.  Throughout US history churches have traditionally been the conscience of our nation. Perhaps you don't like churches, hate pastors and have nightmares about the Sunday School teacher who used to wag her boney finger at you and tell you that you were going straight to hell because your hair was too long or your skirt too short. Well too bad. Sorry for your trauma, but that gives you no excuse to silence people of faith, just because you have a problem with religion in general or some religious people in particular and have chosen to remove yourself from their company.

Churches have a perfect right to exist and if unions can do the political organizing that they do, then so can churches. I listened in on an SEIU meeting a few weeks ago. It was little more than a rally for Democrat candidates.  The leaders manipulated the truth throughout in an attempt to frighten members into voting for Democrats. For some reason that's not troublesome, while Pastor Bob's telling his members that two dudes sleeping together is immoral is no matter what some arbitrary law says on the subject is somehow a threat to the Republic.

Turning the IRS loose on churches that speak their mind, is hypocritical, especially when it's Democrats pressing for churches to be punished for political speech.  In the past month, I've watched a parade of liberal pastors appearing on commercials in support of an initiative here in Washington State to legalize gay marriage.  I plan to introduce evidence to the IRS calling for the same level of scrutiny for the churches that employ those liberal pastors that the IRS applies to scrutinizing conservative pastors who endorsed candidates during the recent "Pulpit Freedom Sunday". Oh, and what about the church pastors in this country who accepted "sermon notes" from the Obama administration to guide them as to how to support the president's policies from the pulpit.

What's sauce for the goose and all that.....

I'm just sayin'

Tom