Tax-Exempt Organizations

Why does church exist, at least in the United States? And most likely other states? Tax breaks. As in, essentially none.

The government looks at churches, assuming it is not a dangerous cult where military personnel has to be sent in to keep kids from being raped in public, as a way to assuage the public conscience. People go in, they come out somehow feeling a little bit better, hopefully. Then on Monday they head into their corporate gig that they usually hate, and somehow that week they can put in their forty hours as they whisper one prayer after another. People are somehow able to get through life this way. Now the type of religion may differ, but this is the system.

Since we are talking economics, this is the break the churches get. It is like credit unions. They both get a HUGE tax break because they are deemed to be services the public needs. The history behind both is quite interesting.

Churches have been around since the time of a man named Zoroaster who ran a huge church in the middle east. People would come, enjoy his song and dance, and then drop a farthing in a bucket on their way out. Over his short lifetime, he amassed quite a following, eventually dominating the middle eastern church circuit as I am going to call it. He is what you would call the “beginning of one god religion”. People love to say that everything came from Abraham. Nope, everything came from Zoroaster. Look it up.

Credit unions are in another group. Credit unions were started in the 1920’s in the United States because places like farms just did not have the financial power or collateral to do what the country needed. So, some enterprising people decided that in the states the government would arrange a different classification of financing institution. One that would have much less taxation by the government but would also not have the vast array of resources like a bank would have, which would have to fight for its customers. Credit unions would usually have things like military membership requirements, government employment requirements, but now all of that is typically gone. Usually what you will find now are credit unions that are the same as banks, but with the tax breaks, or credit unions that are there for the educational fields.

While I would love to claim that credit unions are the brilliant brainchild of the USA, they are not. The concept is an old one, started somewhere in Europe hundreds of years ago, and over time it has just been adopted to suit whatever needs the current country might have, assuming there are economic leaders willing to administrate and run them, since they never produce the same type of profits as a bank does.

There is today’s lesson on public financing institutions that are not particularly competitive but are only there because any individual government has decided they serve a purpose for that country. As history has shown, if a government decides either of these types of places should go away, they do, as when Japan outlawed Islam recently because they considered that religion to be dangerous to their economy. Don’t believe me? Research it kids. I cannot do ALL the work for you.