“Tax the churches” is some Medicare-for-all-who-want-it let-the-South-secede neoliberal white fragility bullshit and leftists need to remove it from their toolkit and vocabulary, in this essay I will

Actually I already did the essay on FB

Income taxes are so good, make the rich, money-hoarding Joel Osteens of the world squeal! So good. Strongly endorsed. Can’t love it enough.

“Tax the churches” will get you like fifty cents and you’ll never win anything again, congratulations numbnuts, you showed your crappy uncle, didntcha

Meanwhile you shut down community hubs (and organizing centers) for marginalized people all over the country and all Joel Osteen got was a crappy 5% increase on his lawyer’s retainer, noice

Guarantee you don’t hate prosperity gospel charlatans more than I do. Shutting down the AME Zion church on the corner and the storefront Spanish Language Pentecostal-ish folks down the street and the kind-but-struggling ELCA that lost members when it became open and affirming?

Not to mention your local gurdwara and shul and masjid and temple?

Feels like the worst kind of revanchism to me; the kind that causes far more harm than the joy you get out of stickin’ it to the bad guys. (And they are absolutely bad!!)

And it’s not exactly endearing to a whole lot of people who you’ll need in order to win anything at all ever.

And it isn’t even worth as much money as you’d think. For every Joel Osteen, there are a dozen tiny churches muddling through with quarter-time pastors on whatever they can scrounge up at monthly pancake breakfasts.

(And some of those are shitty, too! But they don’t have the money you want.)

Um also way more than a dozen, probably like 100.

The point is, I haven't even finished listing all the reasons I'm correct about this, there's also "taxes don't really work like that" and "using bad churches as a source of income necessitates their existence" and "potlucks are socialism actually"