Q: Where do your tax dollars go?
A: To shoring up the shortfall in government dollars created by giving churches such incredible tax exemptions.
What sort of $$ are we talking about? Take a look at this comment in Crikey for some actual figures. The Catholic church, despite being a business (with charity sidelines), gets tax exemptions amounting to millions of dollars per year. The Anglican Church likewise, though no figures are given. But just stop to think about how many churches there are, and realise that each one is exempt from land tax, council rates and capital gains tax (to name just a few of the taxes from which they are exempt), and you begin to get the idea. Think of the size of St Andrew’s Square, in the Sydney CBD, and wonder for a moment what the council rates on that would be! The totals across all denominations are in the billions. One wonders, if the churches were forced to separate charity from business operations and only claim tax exemptions for the charitable operations, just how much of those billions would remain tax exempt. The government would certainly suddenly find itself a lot richer!