Now you know that I am a big proponent of getting rid of tax exemptions and tax subsidies for religious institutions, particular when they begin to push their agenda onto the public or individuals who do not believe in their doctrines of discrimination, hate, segregation, racism, etc. Now a recent analysis was done to provide people with an understanding of just how much churches in the USA profit from those tax exemptions and those tax subsidies. It also discusses what some of those who expouse to be religious do with all that money.
Below I have pulled an excerpt from the article listed to give you some understanding of just how big of a business religion is in the good old US of A.
“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.38 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.39″
http://secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=fi&page=cragun_32_4
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