Debate: Churches ought to pay taxes

In this round, I will be providing rebuttal to Thett’s offensive arguments and defending my own arguments against Thett’s rebuttals. Framework Thett begins by expressing surprise at a purely utilitarian framework rather than higher principles such as separation of church and state. Separation of church and state is not a higher principle. Maybe the purpose of establishing a utilitarian framework was unclear: my framework establishes a system in which impacts are weighed; not a common ‘theme’ of arguments. My framework argued (and was never contested) that impacts ought to be weighed based on the goodness to badness ratio; goodness being the creation of more positive mental states than negative ones. Because Thett never contested my framework, separation of church and state only becomes a ‘higher’ principle in that its impact weighed in positive to negative mental states outweighs any other impacts; or, in the sense of a ‘principal’, categories of impact (such as economic growth, unemployment, crime, and such.) Thett’s claim at the end of this section that if religion is proved as an overall benefit and taxes would harm the prevalence of religion, he would automatically win, is simply untrue. By my established framework, as long as a higher impact is created by taxing churches (a higher impact than harm done to prevalence of religion), I win the debate. Religion is a social good I do not contest the health benefits of being religious. Thus, I concede all of what Thett says here; with the exception community gatherings since that can easily be done at public schools rather than churches. This entire contention only gains impact if Thett can show that taxing churches would result in less religious attendance through the inability of people attending church (because the local church closes down.) I find that this link is unwarranted, and extremely weak at best. If you go back and read through the debate, the only times Thett addresses churches shutting down is through unwarranted claims. There is the exception of bringing up 26,000 Catholic properties in America, of which I address and negate in my second to last paragraph of the next contention. Thus, the link between taxing churches and decrease in health is nonexistent as it is thrown away on the basis of a bare assertion fallacy. Regardless, even if a link did exist and this argument had any impact, the amount of good that could be done with $14.6 billion (see next contention) far outweighs the amount of good that attending church does. $14.6 billion could save millions of lives through preventing starvation and crime. These impacts outweigh decreased stress and lengthened lifetimes. This entire contention is negated on two layers. Economic effects The beginning of this contention is spent attacking my source for the statistic of $71 billion raised from taxing churches. The source can be seen here [1]. I will start at the beginning of the calculation and go step by step until I reach the conclusion. The average church property value is estimated at $1.7 million. This is reached from averaging the property values of 47 different churches in Tampa, Florida. I think this is a reasonable estimate given that the median household property value in the US is $189,400 [2]. The median household property value in Tampa is $165,200 [3]. Because churches are zoned for commercial properties and are only able to be built on residential properties after obtaining a variance, most churches lie on commercial property [4]. And since residential and commercial property values are proven to exhibit strong correlation [5], and commercial property values tend to be significantly higher in value than residential properties [6], the estimation would follow a national trend. As my source [6] explains, it is standard to have a residential property sell for $100,000 and a commercial property of the exact same size across the street sells for $1,000,000. As logic shows, the $1.7 million statistic is reliable. The average property tax on households is 1.29% [7] and commercial property taxes are 20% higher [8], which puts the tax at 1.55%. Thus the average church would thus pay $26,350 in taxes. Given there are 300,000 churches, that ends up being $7,905,000,000. That’s $7.9 billion. Since under the resolution I am only arguing for commercial income tax and property tax, I drop the prior $71 billion to $7.9 billion. Thus my overall money raised from church taxes is $14.6 billion. Thett’s next point is that a tax would shut down thousands of churches and thus lose many jobs. First of all the entire assertion that churches would close down or jobs would be lost is unwarranted, as I explained earlier. But regardless, even if jobs are lost, since the money is reallocated to secular organizations, the same number of new employees are hired at the organization than were lost at the church. This compensates for any lost jobs. Thett makes a sidepoint in the second paragraph noting that 71% of church expenses are on operation costs, which he argues would be tax deductible because internal operations are essential to spending on charity. Thus, the government would only get a portion of that already donated to charity. And since my plan would use the taxed money to donate to charity, my plan would seem pointless since I am taxing charity donations to spend on charity. This argument does not work for a few reasons. Firstly, it assumes that all churches, or even the majority of churches are non profit organizations. This is not true, just as the Ford Motor Company donates some of their income to charity does not make their internal operating expenses tax deductible, neither does a church’s. These internal operation expenses are for religious practice, such as worship, rather than operations relating to charity. Thus, these internal operations would not be tax deductible. The only exception for this is when the church files to be classed as a non profit, or a 501(c)(3) organization. When this happens no income can be used for “private purposes” [9]. This eliminates the ability of a church to function as a church, and thus no longer becomes a church since it provides no worship services, guidance, or whatever. All profit is donated to charity except for money spent to maintain the donation of money (operating expenses.) My plan would not tax these non profit organizations, only churches. And churches are inherently for profit, as my logic just showed. Thus, my tax would take away X amount of money, of which 29% would ordinarily be used for charity, and I would donate it to charity making 92% of it used for charity. Based on my uncontested framework, my plan wins out here. The other option is that the church’s donations to charities are written off on their taxes, and thus I am only taxing the remaining taxable income: 71% of their income. The tax on that income would then further be spent on charity due to my plan, and again, based on my uncontested framework, my plan wins out. Thett goes on to cite the Catholic church in spending 93% of their $170 billion budget on charity. This is all true, and it is of course good. But the claim that church taxes would “tax them out of existence” is unwarranted, as I explained earlier. What will happen is a portion of their budget will be deducted in taxes, which then, according to my plan, will be reallocated to secular nonprofits, of which are just as or more utilitarian in spending their money. It's important to note that using the example of the Catholic Church is cherry-picking, and a more topical example would be the national average, which is 29% of the money going to charity. Taxing and reallocating it would make 92% go to charity. More lives are saved, diseases cured, and homes built through my plan. But even regardless of this, as I said earlier, any money that the Catholic church uses for charity is tax deductible. This means that only funds used for non charity related uses, such as worship, guidance, or whatever is actually taxed. Saying that hospitals would close, or any other negative affect to charity is simply untrue, a tax would only harm the worship part of church. Separation of Church and State Thett’s argument here is that the church and the state have a truce of mutually assured destruction. The problem with this is that is makes the unwarranted assumption that churches would retaliate, or that their retaliation is bad. Neither of these are true. First of all, the head of the largest religious institution in the world endorses church taxes for noncharitable churches [11]. Secondly, taxes won’t significantly harm religious organizations, and Thett has given no argument that it would, so significant retaliation is unlikely. Regardless, the only retaliation that Thett brings up is in endorsing candidates. I don’t see this as a bad thing, as religious institutions have every right to exercise their free speech and endorse candidates. There is no negative here, or at least no negative that Thett has argued for. So the idea that taxing churches is bad because it will result in churches retaliating by endorsing candidates has no impact for Thett since he failed to show why churches endorsing candidates is a bad thing. There is no arguable difference between the Catholic Church, Bernie Sanders, or the NAACP endorsing someone for president. None of these are bad things, this argument has no impact. Also, the claim that the tax exemption status would just be returned is outside the scope of the resolution since it is a should proposition, not a *would*. Suing the government because your taxes went up due to a newly passed law has no ground. The government does not have to spend any money defending that kind of lawsuit since there is nothing to sue over. There is room for debate in what's defined as a church though, and these are funded by wealthy organizations making the cost of these courses more expensive. Sources in comments