Florida & The Religious Reich
There is an old saying:”No man’s life, liberty or property are safe while the Legislature is in session.” That’s why I have a storm flag with a black outline of Florida instead of a square flying in my sidebar when the legislature is in session.
This piece of travesty started at Maru’s place, which directed me to the Pensacola News Journal, and finally to the Pensacola Beach Blogger.
PBB covers the whole sordid affair of special legislation at the state level to screw Orange County out of property taxes from a religious theme park and then segues into our local whackos and their attempts to avoid taxes and regulations.
I’m willing to go along with not taxing places of worship, but theme parks, publishing empires, media facilities, rental property…this has got to stop. If it’s a profit making enterprise in competition with the private sector, it needs to pay taxes because it’s a business, not a religion.
4 comments
Geez, and I thought Jacksonville was Jeebus land.
Take a look at Pensacola Christian College and its publishing arm, Abeka. Abeka is the publisher of choice for “Christian homeschooling”. They avoided paying taxes for years.
Every large Religious Reich church has audio and video recording facilities that most rock groups would kill for. They manufacture and sell their own videos and CDs. When is the last time you saw copyright notices in hymnals? That’s the norm, as these people have their own music schools for “Christian Rock”.
I agree, once again. I don’t find a problem with not taxing the church, itself. The other things it holds, though, that’s a different story. Properties, other than the church itself, should be taxed… especially, if they’re making money off those other holdings.
Governments and churches tend to cluster in county seats and cities which takes a huge bite out of the local tax base. This is one of the problems that many large cities have, large parcels in their property tax area are nontaxable.
It gets to be too much especially when they are competing with local businesses that are paying taxes and being regulated.