Wednesday, October 06, 2010

Jesse Ventura tells the truth about freeloading churches

In all honestly I have a love/hate attitude towards Ventura. He's much better as an ex-governor, and his TruTV show Conspiracy Theories is hackneyed if not interesting. He was pimping the show's second season on Alex Jones' show the other day and he hit on something I've long considered immoral: the fact that churches in Minnesota, and around the country, pay no taxes. They say this has to do with the separation of church and state, but that's not how their exemption was birthed, and this exemption in fact makes them colossal freeloaders. Making them pay taxes like everybody else would not be discriminating against them; it would merely be treating them like every other person and business in the country. In effect, the US federal and state governments have subsidized the pedophilia scandals the churches have been guilty of by allowing them not to have to pay for services they depend upon, like police, fire, snow plowing etc.

This issue has more resonance than ever in Minnesota since the archbishop of the Catholic diocese sent out 400,000 DVDs campaigning against gay marriage during an election season. So the church in effect gets to do its politicking in a tax-exempt way. Nice trick.



His discussion of church's tax-exempt status begins at about four minutes.

4 comments:

DiscordianStooge said...

Churches will never pay taxes. It's wrong, but until churches are moot anyway, it's the way it will be.

Conspiracy Theories is hackneyed if not interesting.

It's not interesting, just dead wrong, and appearing on Alex Jones' show is no way to improve your credibility.

Rob Levine said...

Alright you got me there - I looked back at least year's lineup - not much to recommend it. Still he gets points in my book for tellilng the truth about religion.

DiscordianStooge said...

Yeah, I've always approved of his religion views too.

Phoenix said...

Jesse was better than Norm, I'm give him that.

I knew that a) he'd win in 1998 and b) we'd survive when I saw the answers given by him, Norm and Skip to a question posited them by the Strib on whether incarcerated persons should be made to pay restitution money out of their miniscule prison wages. 

Norm's one-word response: "Absolutely."

Skip's response was a long pile of boilerplate of which I cannot remember one word. 

Jesse's response was that while it was a "tempting" idea, the bureaucracy that would need to be created would cost more than could be recovered from the prisoners.  In other words, he -- or his minders -- actually thought this through sufficiently to provide the correct answer, if not the correct reasons therefor.

Jesse would go on to do a lot of crazy and stupid things, but he also gave us light rail when nobody else could.