{"id":196931,"date":"2008-03-13T16:33:00","date_gmt":"2008-03-13T21:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/03\/13\/senator-looking-at-lavish-lifestyles-of-televangelists\/"},"modified":"2008-03-13T16:33:00","modified_gmt":"2008-03-13T21:33:00","slug":"senator-looking-at-lavish-lifestyles-of-televangelists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/03\/13\/senator-looking-at-lavish-lifestyles-of-televangelists\/","title":{"rendered":"Senator Looking at Lavish Lifestyles of Televangelists"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The thing that the media will cover, of course, is the <a href=\"http:\/\/talkingpointsmemo.com\/news\/2008\/03\/senator_backs_televangelist_pr.php\">expensive cars, private jets, and so on that many of these &#8220;prosperity preachers&#8221; have<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>There is actually a very real issue here.  Churches, unlike <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">every other 501(c)3 tax exempt organization<\/span>, is <a href=\"http:\/\/40yrs.blogspot.com\/2007\/11\/senate-investigating-top-televangelists.html\">not required to file a publicly accessible 990 form<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I incorporated a 501(c)3 tax exempt organization and chase the paperwork through the IRS in 1990 as a non-lawyer, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.arisia.org\/\">Arisia<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>When I was involved in running it, gross revenues were less than $50,000\/year, and now it&#8217;s probably less than $200K\/year.<\/p>\n<p>For any church, considering building, maintenance, salaries and benefits for, preacher, secretary, education director, and janitor, you are well above $500K on anything but the tiniest church.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s too expensive for <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">them<\/span>, but it&#8217;s not too expensive for <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">us<\/span>.<\/p>\n<p>They object to form 990s because they do not want their parishioners to know that they are wasting their money on their own inflated lifestyles.<\/p>\n<p>Check out the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.trinityfi.org\/\">Trinity Foundation<\/a> a Christian reform organization that has been talking about this for years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The thing that the media will cover, of course, is the expensive cars, private jets, and so on that many of these &#8220;prosperity preachers&#8221; have. There is actually a very real issue here. Churches, unlike every other 501(c)3 tax exempt organization, is not required to file a publicly accessible 990 form. I incorporated a 501(c)3 &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[970,1020,985,1021,983],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-196931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-legislation","category-regulation","category-religion","category-taxes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196931"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196931"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196931\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}