Billions in Tax Exempt Religious
Property Subsidies
Leave Public Finance Blind Spot
If you're looking for sources of tax revenue to provide for things like healthcare, here's one idea, remove the tax exemption on religious property. According to Dallin Overstreet: "The United States has roughly 370,000 religious congregations. All are exempt from federal income tax. Each are exempt from local property taxes. Combined, the estimated value of tax-exempt religious property in America runs somewhere between $300 billion and $600 billion. Nobody knows the precise number, because nobody is required to count . . . The result is an enormous blind spot in American public finance: we subsidize hundreds of billions of dollars in tax-exempt property and have essentially no systematic data on what the public gets in return. His full analysis is here: How Much Revenue Would Taxing Churches Generate? -- S.R. 7/19/26
