Rick Warren's Taxes and Tax Breaks......THE NATION

[Ichingcarpenter]

The California megachurch minister and opponent of gay marriage who will deliver the invocation at Barack Obama's inauguration had his income tax returns audited in 1996. When the IRS tried to collect the taxes it claimed he owed, Warren went to court. Congress then passed a law granting Warren's tax deduction, pre-empting the US Court of Appeals from even taking up the case against him. The votes in the House and Senate were unanimous.

The IRS permits members of the clergy to claim exemptions for their housing. At the time of Warren's audit the amount claimed had to be "reasonable"--it shouldn't exceed the fair market value for the rental of the home. That 1996 audit concluded that Warren was deducting more than that--the IRS said he owed it $55,300. Warren challenged the IRS in tax court, arguing that his housing exemption should be unlimited.
The facts were simple: in 1993 Warren deducted $77,663, his entire Saddleback Church salary that year, as a housing expense--and paid no taxes at all on that salary. In addition, he claimed a deduction for his mortgage expenses--even though they had been covered by the salary. He made similar claims in subsequent tax returns.
Warren spent four years defending his housing deduction in tax court; in May 2000 he won. The court struck down the IRS's "reasonable" clergy-housing cap and accepted Warren's argument that his housing claim could be unlimited. The IRS appealed, and since Warren lives in California, the case went to the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, known for its liberal judges. That court declared that it wanted to consider not only whether the IRS had been right in trying to limit Warren's tax deduction for housing but also whether the tax break for clergy housing violated the establishment clause in the Bill of Rights, which requires separation of church and state.

Seeking arguments on the constitutionality of the "parsonage exemption," as it was called, the Ninth Circuit panel appointed Erwin Chemerinsky as a friend of the court. At the time, Chemerinsky was teaching law at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles; today he is dean of the law school at the University of California, Irvine (and thus my colleague). Chemerinsky observed that the housing tax exemption applied only to "ministers of the gospel"--not to leaders of secular nonprofits engaged in humanitarian work. He noted that the rule was established in 1954, at the height of the cold war, after a Congressman argued that "in these times when we are being threatened by a godless and antireligious world movement we should correct this discrimination against certain ministers of the gospel who are carrying on such a courageous fight against this foe." Chemerinsky concluded that the exemption represented an intentional government subsidy of religion, and thus it violated the First Amendment's establishment clause.>>>>snip.........


The Clergy Housing Allowance Clarification Act of 2002 was approved unanimously by Congress, then signed into law by George W. Bush on May 20, 2002, rendering the IRS case against Warren moot. "I have filed hundreds of briefs in federal courts," Chemerinsky told me, "and this is the only time that Congress passed a law to make a specific pending case moot." He added, "It is very rare for Congress to pass a law to make a pending case moot before there was a decision."


http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090202/wiener

[Skittles]

1. it sickens me this bastard will be any part of the inauguration

:puke:

[lostnotforgotten]

2. I Honestly Can't Understand Obama's Game Plan Here

eom

[madrchsod]

4. disarming the enemy...

warren owes obama now....the far right christians never liked warren but the middle of the road republican christians do...if obama needs a favor....

[lostnotforgotten]

7. Maybe

eom

[ThomCat]

20. How is he disarmed?

He's more influential now than ever. If anything, he's got more sway over Obama now than ever before because of his growing clout with the religious right.

[Hannah Bell]

21. doubt it.

[DemBones DemBones]

3. The LOUT has CLOUT. I wonder why Congress passed that law

unanimously? That is much more troubling than Warren's cheating.

[Ichingcarpenter]

5. I bet the Mormons and the Catholic church get the same breaks

as does Pat Robertson and his crew. I'm really having problems
with organized religion.

[madrchsod]

8. the catholic church in my city is about 3/4 of a block

and the land is`t prime for commercial development. i really have a hard time with mega churches because of the huge amount of land they take out of the real estate taxes in a community. shit you could put a lot of churches in the same space as one mega chiurch

[DemBones DemBones]

11. Most churches provide church-owned housing to pastors to

help offset their typically low salaries (I'm not talking megachurches that pay their pastors megamoney.) Note I said church-owned housing, nothing fancy, and the pastor has to live there whether he likes the place or not. That also means people can find him just about any time they want to so he doesn't get much downtime. I've been friends with pastors' wives and their lives are not easy. They're expected, by the congregation, to do all sorts of free work for the church, too. I don't object to the free housing under those conditions, it's an offset to low pay.

That's a whole 'nother thing to what Warren pulled -- he claimed his whole 1996 salary of $73,000-plus as his "housing allowance" and then deducted his mortgage payments, too, and Congress let him do it! :wtf: I also suspect Warren is living pretty high on the hog, not in a modest parsonage.

[Ichingcarpenter]

12. Tax Churches if they get past a economic stratum

It is not just one tax that religious organizations are excused from paying, but an entire constellation of them. Clergy are exempt from federal taxes on housing and can opt out of Social Security and Medicare withholding. Religious employers are generally exempt from federal and state unemployment taxes, and in some states, religious publications are exempt from sales tax. Church benefit and retirement plans do not require the church employer to match its employees' contributions. Churches are automatically exempted from filing annual public informational reports on their financial status and activities, and donations made to churches are eligible for income tax deductions. And, of course, the two major tax breaks: church groups do not have to pay income tax and do not have to pay taxes on property which they own.
It is time to end this unfair and unjustifiable special treatment. Religion has done nothing to deserve it, and has done much to disqualify itself. There are compelling reasons to tax the churches, and this post will examine them.
Repealing churches' tax exemption prevents unnecessary and complicated legal tangles. At the moment, the tax-exempt status of a church gives groups a strong incentive to declare themselves to be religious organizations, which inevitably leads to protracted legal battles over whether a given organization is a church or not. (The space alien cult of Scientology's multi-year legal battle with the U.S. government to win tax-exempt status is a case in point.) This policy puts the government in the unenviable position of having to set policy on exactly what constitutes a religion.

As part of its tax-exempt status, a recognized church may not endorse candidates from the pulpit. However, it can speak out without restriction on issues, a loophole large enough to drive a truck through, and one which has been exploited to the hilt by church groups of every political faction. Any church leader with an ounce of intelligence can figure out how to use this as a backdoor strategy to make it exceedingly clear which candidate his parishioners are expected to vote for, and again the government is placed in the unenviable situation of examining church leaders' statements and trying to figure out whether they only concern issues or whether they are about candidates (and if a church leader takes all the same positions on the issues as a candidate, how is this any different from endorsing that candidate directly?). If anything fosters an "excessive entanglement" between church and state, this does.

Eliminating the tax-exempt status of churches would neatly slice these two Gordian knots and solve both of these problems in a single stroke. If churches paid taxes like any other group, there would be no reason for anyone to fight over whether a particular group is "religious enough" to constitute a church or not, and no reason for anyone to affect that status as a tax strategy. And if churches could endorse candidates the ludicrous loophole that currently allows them to do so free of charge would be closed. They are already doing so anyway; they might as well pay taxes for the privilege like everyone else.

Repealing churches' tax exemption threatens no one's freedom of religion

[DemBones DemBones]

27. If churches are taxed, who will do all the charitable work now being

done by churches? Churches have expenses for maintaining their buildings to meet safety codes, insurance against fire and theft and lawsuits filed by someone who falls on church property, heat, air conditioning, electricity, etc., not to mention paying and often housing the pastor. If they had to pay taxes, too, the donations of church members might not even cover expenses, much less allow the church to continue its charitable works. Not all churches are as rich as Saddleback, many serve people of limited means. My own church has a membership that ranges from very well-off to very poor, with most having moderate means. And there are always people in every church who have enough money to contribute but regularly attend church and never put more than a dollar or two in the collection plate.

From what I know, it's not that difficult to get a new church approved for tax exemption. There are non-religious churches that enjoy tax exemptions and some have few expenses because they don't really act as churches, don't have the expenses of a building or a pastor.

I'm sure we'll have to agree to disagree on the issue, though, because we look at it so differently. :hi:

[Hannah Bell]

18. They didn't until Congress passed a special law - for Warren. This is the most salient point. The

exemption was passed specific to his tax problems, & it was unanimous. & that is scary, considering what it says about the kind of pull he has. And why? He's the puppet, who pulls the strings?

[DemBones DemBones]

28. Exactly. The original exemption was meant to

allow a church to provide its pastor with housing as compensation since pastor's salaries are typically low. I'd love to know how Warren got this unethical law passed in his favor.

[madrchsod]

6. all these "mega churches" do

a large mega church bought a shopping mall near here resulting in tens of thousands of untaxed sq feet of real estate. my local church has a foot print the size of a mega church entrance.

[Ichingcarpenter]

9. I think religion needs a Sherman antitrust act of its own

I didn't know about this law that was past in 2002.
Something is out of balance with the system and
the mega churches are part of it.

[Critters2]

10. The Warren case wasn't about the value of church building property.

It had to do with how clergy report housing allowance or parsonage value for the the purpose of income and self-taxes. The real property of churches and other non-profits is never taxed. But parsonages and housing allowances are compensation, and are taxed through income taxes.

[madrchsod]

13. that`s what i get for skimming the article

ya warmed up yet? we set a record up here the other day...polo and dixon 32 below!

[Critters2]

14. -32 air temp?! Wow! I don't think we got lower than -20 air temp.

I was surprised to wake up this morning to +1. I thought it was supposed to be warmer than that. It's 14 above now. Downright balmy!

Congrats on that record! :hi:

[Hannah Bell]

22. Nice way to lock up prime RE for the future, isn't it?

[Hannah Bell]

17. Because he has some very powerful backers, that's why. Warren the man is nothing.

His backers are the ones Congress deferred to, & Obama as well, & it troubles me too. I would love to be in a position to find out who's funded him all these years, got him his book contracts, got him his gov't contracts, etc. Cause no preacher gets to where he is, in the time frame he did, without lots of behind-the-scenes help.

[Ichingcarpenter]

25. I found this month he was behind the Video game - Left Behind: Eternal Forces:

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/05/31/left-behind-christia.html


It costs money to produce games. There are power structures
behind the scenes that put this guy forward.

I never figured out why Billy Graham was so powerful and even
listen to by the government until later.

[Hannah Bell]

26. That's interesting, thanks for the info.

"(Warren) describes himself as a "stealth evangelist" and describes his training programs as "a stealth movement, that's flying beneath the radar...He claims that he has sold tens of millions of copies of The Purpose Driven Life by developing a worldwide network of pastors.

The international director of Mr. Warren's Purpose Driven Church, Mark Carver, is a former investment banker who serves on the Advisory Board of the corporation created in October 2001 to develop and market this game. The creators plan to market their game using the same network marketing techniques that Mr. Warren used to turn The Purpose Driven Life into a commercial success."

http://www.talk2action.org/story/2006/5/29/195855/959.


I would love to know who's behind this guy, & why they're pushing this kind of religion so hard.

[Hannah Bell]

15. "Congress then passed a law granting Warren's tax deduction"

Just keeps getting better, doesn't it?

The guy has his behind-the-scenes big money backers, & that's why he's where he is.

If you think he got there, got his book contract, got his government contracts, got his mega-church, just by building up a start-up ministry on a shoestring, you're delusional.

Warren is a made man.

[davefromqueens]

16. Welfare

The mega churches are not religious entities, they are business enterprises.

These pastors make millions off the flock, mostly by not paying taxes.

it's time to tax them just like most other businesses.

[leftstreet]

19. MAJOR WTF: 'Clergy Housing Allowance Clarification Act of 2002 '

You gotta be kidding me

This guy's DC clout is scary

:scared:

[1776Forever]

23. Did you know W & Warren are buds? - Really - RW gave W Medal of P.E.A.C.E. .. link.......

Pastor Rick Warren's Star Continues to Rise
By Bill Berkowitz
Sat Dec 13, 2008

http://www.talk2action.org/story/2008/12/13/17915/243

(snip)

On December 1 -- World AIDS Day -- Warren, pastor of the Lake Forest, California-based Saddleback Valley Community Church and who is well on his way to becoming one of the most recognizable and powerful pastors in the United States, hosted his Saddleback Civil Forum on Global Health at the Washington-based Newseum.

As part of the event, he bestowed upon President George W. Bush the first "International Medal of P.E.A.C.E." from the Global PEACE Coalition, in recognition of Bush's "unprecedented contribution to the fight against HIV/AIDS and other diseases," a Saddleback Church press release announced.

Warren discussed with both Bush, and the First Lady, Laura Bush, their "past accomplishments and priorities moving forward regarding international health issues -- including HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria."

President-elect Barack Obama, who appeared with Senator John McCain this past August at Warren's Saddleback Forum on the Presidency, provided a video-taped message addressing the future of global health.

Warren's recognition of Bush revolved around the administration's "implementation and success of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which has provided 18.8 billion dollars since 2003 to combat global HIV/AIDS," a pre-event press release pointed out. "Congress has recently authorized an additional 48 billion dollars for ongoing efforts to address this pandemic as well as tuberculosis and malaria over the next five years."

While Bush, whose approval ratings have dipped to all-time lows, got the award, Pastor Rick Warren bathed in the spotlight.

"As my wife Kay and I have been implementing the PEACE Plan in 68 developing countries, we have seen firsthand many of the hundreds of thousands of lives that have been saved through PEPFAR and the President's Malaria Initiative," Warren said. "I hope that this forum will show the American people that our global health programs represent more than compassionate humanitarian efforts, but are also a strong, prudent pillar of American foreign policy."

(much more at link)

..............

As I have stated before as others have this man is a legend in his own mind. He strives for POWER! Time Magazine and others have written about it. This just isn't about Prop 8, as if that wasn't enough, it is about a power grab for faith-base $$$$ for Obama's future Administration! I hope he is stopped before it happens but it sure is a freight train on the track right now headed in that direction! If you want links for this just check out my journal.


:argh:

[anonymous171]

24. Holy shit how can we get rid of that law? I'm tired of these megachurch assholes.