Reasonable Dissent

A Church Lottery Scam

First of all, check out this short AP story on a church winning the lottery in Michigan yesterday [here].  It’s just a fluffy piece of semi-news about a church winning the runner-up of lottery prizes. Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Oh, atheist blogger, he’s about to rant some way or another about how a church shouldn’t be gambling, hypocrisy…” and so forth. Well, that’s not the case. Whatever, let them play. Let them buy the ticket as an organization and spend the money on whatever they want. Dare I say, let them buy it with donated funds! If you donated to that church, I strongly doubt that you made any kind of legal arrangements for its use. If they wanted to use your dollar to fund vibrating seat cushions for the whole church, they could. But this line kind of put a thorn in my side:

Michigan Lottery officials say the church will receive the full amount of the prize because it is a tax-exempt group.

So right off the bat, I want to say that this is entirely not the purpose behind giving them tax-exempt status. School districts that were promised more funding when they established a lottery and the like are losing out.  It’s the letter of the law, but not the spirit. And really, I don’t blame them. Why pay something they don’t owe? But it’s time to revisit the idea of churches being tax-exempt. I’m not here to complain about non-profit organizations getting out of taxes, but honestly not all of a church’s expenditures should count for this. If I donate money to a charity, I get to deduct that from my income tax. If the church raises money for a brand new solid gold Jesus, they don’t. There’s nothing about a brand new solid gold Jesus that has anything to do with being a non-profit organization, but you can’t tell a church how to spend its money. I say, let them pay taxes on income used for non-charitable purposes, and deduct what they use to fund their soup kitchen. If churches are doing things right, this shouldn’t change things very much, should it?

But then I thought, well hey, how can we all cash in on this nice tax dodge? So I’ve come up with a scam. Here’s how it works: I go to a church official and tell him that I have $1 that I’d like to give to the church, to buy a lottery ticket. The stipulation is that of any winnings, I get 80% and the church gets 20%. Why would I, your committed atheist, want do donate to the church? Because it works out to the favor of both of us. I’ll explain: I’ve donated the money for the church to buy a ticket, so they are the rightful tax-exempt recipients, so they get 100% of the winnings, less my 80%. Had I redeemed my ticket by myself, I would be subject to some terrible amount of taxes that would get uncomfortably close to 50% of my winnings. I’ve just made some serious money by using the church to launder my lottery winnings, so to speak. Where’s the problem? The church isn’t risking any money; I wouldn’t give them that dollar otherwise, so there’s no problem for them to join in. And it makes it worth more to me to gamble in the lottery. $1 per ticket for a $1 million jackpot, to me, is really $1 for a chance at $500,000. Now it’s $1 for a chance at $800,000. Same odds.

Any churches want to volunteer?

Tags: General