Romney since when is tithing bad

Money may be the root of all evil, but, for Mormons, it also provides a pathway to the highest heaven. Tithing, they argue, is repaying a debt owed to God or showing obedience. To some, the bigger question is: Should The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints do away not with tithing but with tithing as a prerequisite for accessing the temple and its exalting ordinances by which members can qualify for celestial glory?

Indeed, says historian D. Michael Quinn. Tribune file photo D. Quinn's new book about Mormon church finances has just been released.

Allowing members to attend the temple without paying could be a good move, Brunson theorizes. Mormonism has never separated economics from eternal truths; fiscal realities go hand in hand with spiritual needs. It was a time of communitarian experiments, and the fledgling church was all-in, caring for armies of new converts who arrived with little more than the clothes on their backs.

Tithing, with its biblical roots, is seen as a preparatory step before a return to the United Order. The church, with its lay ministry at the local level, uses the money to build temples and chapels , to buttress its worldwide missionary outreach, and to support its vast educational offerings, including Brigham Young University.

Then, in the early s, church President Lorenzo Snow made a big push for the collection of tithes, and church revenues shot up. LDS leaders could see tithing receipts slip again, however. In the early 20th century, BYU administrators wanted to guarantee that all its professors were full tithe payers, even proposing to deduct the amounts from employee paychecks.

Between the two of us, apparently we already have a flat tax. Flat tax is to the "who pays for what" discussion what get the government out of the marriage business is to conversations about marriage equality: a way to avoid discussing practical solutions. A derail. A demonstration of privilege by people who are not at the sharp end of the problem, that they can take the conversation so far from reality. My mother is a tax lawyer. I know what the likelihood of passing an applicable, loophole-free, enforceable flat tax would be—even if it were any kind of good idea.

Whelks will surf supernovas first. I had to look up whelks, being ignorant. Having looking them up, I can say with great certainty that this is the perfect metaphor. I stole it from Douglas Adams. Ford Prefect uses it as an analogy in Life, the Universe and Everything , and Arthur Dent completely fails to understand what he's talking about.

Also, having reread the original scene, Sudden Obsession with Whelks is the name of my next Culture ship. I imagine when I read that line I thought to myself, Arthur-Dent-style, surely he's describing some unimaginable phenomena that I cannot imagine, not actually trying to communicate in knowable metaphors.

The people who clamor for a flat tax usually go all quiet when you ask if we can start with Social Security withholding which currently is drastically regressive. But back to Paul A at It seems to me you are not giving sufficient weight to the words "at least" and "over". Well, the reason I'm not giving any weight to the words "at least" and "over" is because they're weasel words. If his total outlays are being questioned, what's his motivation to round down? He has not given the public any reason at all to trust him or even to cut him any slack on the question of his personal finances.

This, after all, is the guy who in the primary debates, looked us in the eye and lied about his given name. Instead, he weaselled, and left us with the distinct impression that he doesn't actually meet the requirements of his religion.

I know that our derailing driveby is unlikely to be back, and I suspect that he is so deeply entrenched in his tribal identity as to be impervious to any contra-arguments. But, in the event that he mistakes a failure to address his comments for agreement with them, I'd like to take a moment to touch on a few points of interest.

First off, the best way to deal with the deficit is to improve the tax base. Get more people back into work, in jobs that pay enough that they're being taxed. So far, we're all in agreement. But trickle-down bullshit hasn't worked to get them into those jobs. So enough with using the tax system to increase the balances of a bunch of accounts in the Cayman Islands.

That money doesn't stimulate the economy. Instead, let's get it to the people who will spend it in their local businesses, buy consumer goods, and create the jobs that make and sell the things they will buy. The tax revenues from making the rich pay their share won't fill the gap—but they're the seed money for broad-based economic stimulus.

They're an investment. The returns from that investment are what reduces the deficit. Secondly, I've lived in a country where pretty much every sane politician was a socialist. On the one hand, it wasn't such a bad place to live well, apart from the climate, but you can't blame an economic system for that. On the other hand, the experience made me quite clear on the fact that Obama is nowhere in the neighborhood of socialism.

Nor, by the way, is he a fascist or anything like that. Anyone who says either is simply exposing a staggering, faintly amusing ignorance. As for me, I treat elections as job interviews. Candidates should demonstrate that they support the values of the organization they seek to join, including both transparency and public-spiritedness. Refusing to reveal his tax returns reveals the former; I suspect that the contents of the tax returns demonstrate the latter.

Candidates should also, by the way, have a can-do attitude. But one of the two political parties has built its entire message on the idea that government doesn't work.

Their continued election is dependent on that message being correct. Surprisingly enough, when they're in charge of it, government tends not to work. I've lived in countries where everyone seeking election believes that government is a useful tool. And I've noticed that in those places, it tends to work better than it does in the US particularly when the no-can-do guys are at the tiller.

Not increasing the tax base is exactly the idiocy which is the result of the doctrinaire adhesion to "austerity" in European politics. Greece is notorious for tax evasion. We have all the fuss about cutting spending, and forcing people into unpaid work, here in the UK. I'm not sure I'd want to give up discussing changes to current policies just because they seem very unlikely to pass.

In , I imagine I would have put gay marriage in that category, and today, ceasing our sociopathic foreign policy or building of the infrastructure for a police state here at home seem unrealistic. For what it's worth, with far less expertise than you or your mom, I think a much simpler tax system where all income was treated the same and there were far fewer deductions and exemptions available would be preferable to what we have now. Ideally, that would include getting rid of the ceiling on income taxed for social security and medicare.

Very rich people will always be able to do some game playing to minimize their effective tax rate. But I think we'd be better off if there were less return on investments in clever tax dodges, and fewer smart people making a living playing complicated zero-sum games over who will pay how much to the IRS.

One thing I find interesting is how little of campaign coverage fits the job interview model, or the related model of how you personally choose, say, a dentist or accountant or lawyer.

I can't help suspecting that's largely because evaluating a candidate for a demanding job is work, and the TV news channels in particular are selling entertainment. For a lot of people, I rather suspect politics has more in common with cheering for their football team than with choosing someone to do a demanding job, or keeping tabs on someone who is supposed to be doing a demanding job on your behalf. I think there's juice in looking at ways to simplify the tax system in the ways you've described.

I also think there'd be a huge fight about it, because many people who stand to lose x per annum if the law goes through will see the logic in investing 0. But that's different than what I was talking about: an applicable, loophole-free, enforceable flat tax. The penultimate word is the whelk-word. Part of the problem with "flat tax" proposals lies in the definition of "flat".

Obviously, a "flat" tax taxes all income equally so far, so good! What is income? What exactly is the difference between a gift and a tip, and who decides? Is it income if you're a church, and your parishioners give it to you on Sunday? What about expenses? For businesses we currently tax "net" income, after deducting expenses. What's an expense? What about living expenses for individuals? What about money spent to pay other taxes state taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, taxes to foreign governments?

Which of those should be taxed a second time, and which shouldn't? It's kind of like saying "we shouldn't need all the inefficiencies of criminal laws, and courts, and police; we should just throw people in prison if they've done something bad".

Our tax code, like our criminal code, is too complicated, and unjust in many aspects. But that doesn't mean that it's possible to replace it with something really simple. Much of the complexity is intrinsic to the situation and especially needed to deal with natural attempts to "game" any such system for individual advantage. Or, to steal from Einstein, our tax code like our legal code should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. Not to mention that a flat tax is regressive in effect , no matter what its advocates claim.

At low income levels, absolute numbers matter as much as percentages. The especially dishonest thing about flat-tax advocates is that they generally try to appeal to the rest of us by talking about how much simpler the tax system would be. I recall Steve Forbes, when he was running for the presidency back in '96, going on about how, with a flat tax, you'd be able to send your tax form in as a postcard.

What this overlooks is that the complexity of the tax code isn't located in the percentage of taxes you pay the IRS gives you a look-up table for that. The complexity is located in the steps you go through to figure out what your taxable income is. Rich people have lots of ways of manipulating that figure, and they're not going to give them up.

Look at a IRS form. That'd be the one you filled out this year, for your income. Lines are all devoted to figuring out your taxable income, and lines are all about figuring out how much tax you've already paid, or if you need to pay more, or whether you qualify for tax credits. Some of those lines reference other forms, meaning you might have to go through over a hundred lines of arithmetic to figure out your taxable income.

Once you've tallied it all up, though, that's just three lines to work out what your tax rate is: A flat tax would change the instruction for line 44, and maybe get rid of 45 and 46; that's all. All that talk of simplicity is bullshit to cover up the fact that a flat tax would impoverish people at the lower end of the income spectrum, to the benefit of those at the high end.

Examples: Child credit, healthcare spending accounts, mortgage interest deduction, student loan interest deduction, deduction for charitable donations, and tons of smaller examples.

The small examples tend to be the things brought up as absurdities of the tax code in complaining articles. Taxes could be much simpler if we stopped using the tax code to reward these behaviors, but most of us want the government to guide people into pursuing education, raising children, etc and this is the tool we Americans have used for the last several decades. How much of your mortgage is paying for the cost of your home office, how much of your car maintenance goes to your work travel, how should you count customers who haven't paid you yet?

This seems unavoidably complicated; there is a reason accountants need years of training. This is the one which a flat tax would reduce: If everyone has the same tax rate, and the same initial deduction, then there is no incentive to shift income from one year to another.

Note that this principal should logically lead to a very large negative income tax at the lowest income tiers, which most flat tax advocates don't support. I suspect this is a very small part of tax complexity as experienced by most payers, because most of us have no ability to shift our income.

But it might be a large part of complexity as measured by hours spent by tax attorneys because, whenever I read about the complicated tax schemes of the wealthy, there seems to be a lot of manipulation of this sort. A real flat tax would be neither regressive nor progressive, pretty much by definition. Everyone pays the same rate. The problem several people are labeling as having a regressive effect is really just that it's moving from a progressive higher rates on higher incomes to a flat rate.

So those are neither flat nor regressive. The main argument for higher rates on higher incomes, as well as deductions for dependents, is to avoid taxing away anyone's eating money, or more broadly to try not to impose too much hardship on anyone while raising enough money. I think the thing where you deduct from your taxable income based on number of dependents is about not taxing away your eating money.

That strikes me as quite different from mortgage interest deductions, health savings accounts, first time home buyer credits, etc. The problem, of course, is that some of us pay hefty local and state taxes in addition to federal. This is not just Romney in action. The Republicans seem to have decided to do nothing but lie until the election: over three months.

We're going to be crazy and sick with disgust by the end of it. Charles P. Pierce , on fire at the RNC: It was an entire evening based on a demonstrable lie. It was an entire evening based on demonstrable lies told in service to the overriding demonstrable lie.

And there was only one real story for actual journalists to tell at the end of it. They don't care that their lies are obvious. They don't care that their lies wouldn't fool an underpaid substitute Social Studies teacher in a public middle school, who would then probably go out one night and get yelled at by Chris Christie.

They believe in teachers," he said in his speech. Yeah, you just don't believe in paying them. They don't care that their history is a lie and that, by spreading it, they devalue the actual history of the country, which is something that belongs to us. They've pulled out all the stops.

They think this election will be their victory, and there will be no-one to call them to account at the end of it. And they may be right. They own a whole television network and have a huge staff of net propagandists to spread their lies. The "vote fraud" lies are widely believed. The "Obama has removed the work requirements for welfare" lies seem to be taking hold.

This must have been what the run-up to fascism was like in the s, with the mass media pumping out lies and the media-induced madness setting a population against itself.

Well…it isn't the s. There is some hope. Talmage, The Articles of Faith, 12th ed. Evidently Brother Brigham had heard a lot of quibbling, for he said in the October conference in When a man comes into the church he wants to know if he must reckon his clothing, bad debts, lands, etc.

It is the law to give one-tenth of what he has got, and then one-tenth of his increase or one-tenth of his time. I have never met people of that kind but what I believe if I were in partnership with them and they had a tenth interest in that partnership, they would know pretty well what that tenth was. I do not think they would have any difficulty whatever in finding how much I owed them. So I am inclined to think that if we wanted to, we would have no difficulty in finding out what is one-tenth of our income, and that is what we owe to the Lord.

Now I am thoroughly persuaded that we could all profit by developing within ourselves the spirit which President Grant always evidenced toward this divine law of tithing. For a glimpse of that spirit, I call attention to the remarks he made in the October conference. In that conference, President Snow, after telling of the increase of tithing paid by the Saints in over what they had paid in , continued:. I want to have this principle so fixed [he was referring to the principle of tithing] upon our hearts that we shall never forget it.

As I have said more than once, I know that the Lord will forgive the Latter-day Saints for their past negligence in paying tithing, if they will now repent and pay a conscientious tithing from this time on. President Grant at that time was a young apostle, and in his conference talk he said:. Sacrifice doth bring forth the blessings of heaven. I bear my testimony to the truth of what Brother Lund has said today, that if the people will pay their tithes and offerings, they will not only be blessed in their material affairs, but they will be abundantly blessed with increased outpouring of the Spirit of the Lord.

But I want to say to those who are able to pay those debts, it will be a great deal better for them if they will do so, notwithstanding, they have been forgiven. Now I bear you my testimony, brothers and sisters, that I know this matter of tithing is a true principle and that blessings come from it. We were refugees from Mexico. During the years that followed, father had a difficult time getting enough food to feed his family.

When father and his brother came out of Mexico, they both had large families. Knowing that they would have a difficult time to make a living they brought nothing out of Mexico except what they could bring in one trunk , they joined together and pooled their earnings. Later they moved to Oakley, Idaho, where they could raise their families in a Latter-day Saint environment.

When one of them was out of work, they divided the income of the other and thus eked out an existence for both families. My uncle got out of work one winter in Idaho. They had to pay rent, they had to buy everything they ate, and they had to buy fuel, except that I went out on the side hill and dug the sagebrush from under the snow for fuel. I kept warm digging and mother kept warm poking it into the stove.

The rest of them nearly froze. I remember that council, and I remember that they decided that they would pay their tithing, and I remember that they sent me with the tithing to the bishop.

I know that you have a great feeling if you live that law. As I say, I give the credit to my parents. I remember after we were married—my wife and I—that I was working my way through school and I was working at the post office eight hours a day and carrying a full course of law. We had lost a baby, and we had a large hospital bill.

I decided to quit the post office and start the practice of law. I quit in September and failed to pay tithing in September because I had built up a retirement benefit with the government that was to be paid to me in November, with which I felt I could pay my tithing.

I had to report that year to my bishop that I had not paid a full tithe. But I did not feel good about it, so I kept a record and paid it in installments at 8 percent interest until I had paid the deficit in full.

I had a good feeling after I got it paid. I knew the Lord had understood and accepted my performance.