First of all, I would say that if one is giving to their church just for taxation benefits, they are doing it for all the wrong reasons.
When individuals set themselves up as the arbiters over economcs and how things should work as opposed to what has worked for more than a century, I'm inclined to see that one or some as ill-qualified as a leader with them being so short-sighted.
But taxes are not based on whether something (be it money or product) has been taxed already or not. Taxes are based on transfers of ownership. For instance, your employer pays taxes on the money he earns by selling product or services. He uses the money -he- paid taxes on to pay you for the work you do for him. And YOU pay taxes on the money you get from him that he paid taxes on.
Never minding, of course, that the money employers pay in salary is tax exempt for the business as an expenditure from its income. Dude, you really have some strange ideas about how things REALLY work.
That is the way taxes work. Government would go broke (broker?) if money and products were only taxed once.
Government only goes broke when it ceases to be accountable to the citizenry, and control its spending. The tax-n-spend philosophy of both the R's and D's is out of control. Politicians have for a long time now been exercising their office as if they are not accountable to the people. Town hall after town hall has shown people asking their representatives to reduce the outrageous spending within government. None of us has any real idea as to how deep the corruption runs within local and federal government, but that too is a HUGE factor in the deficit. We've all heard the old adage about how if any one of us as individfuals conducted our economic responsibilities the way the various levels of government conduct themselves, any of us would have been imprisoned long ago.
So, you're right in some respects in that the laws of economics always win out in the end, mostly with governments going broke because of a lack of self-discipline and self-restraints. They talk like they can't afford to keep the lines painted on the roadways, and yet have all kinds of money to build arenas with no immediate parking for the general populace to attend events in those places. Meanwhile, the kick-backs and other under-the-table payments that go out into Swiss bank accounts of politicians and other officials in government, it all adds up to making the economics of it all to actually balance out. Our recent county sherrif left office because of 96 counts of corruption from contracts he awarded. They traced 96 counts of kick-backs to his myriad of accounts all over the world, and he's just ONE of the many local city officials who was caught simply because he ticked off the wrong person who blew the whistle on him.
So, rather than assume that government is so clean and righteous enough to be taxing church organizations that provide benefit to communities that you fail to recognize, in spite of the bad apples out there, you might stop and think about the meaning of grace. In other words, rather than penalizing ALL on the basis of the bad few or many, consider what value those places can provide communities in hard times as the only places people can go who are suffering and in need of spiritual and emotional comfort and assurance, including sustenance when they're down.
Jr
