Tax Exempt Quotes

The divorce between Church and State ought to be absolute. It ought to be so absolute that no Church property anywhere, in any state or in the nation, should be exempt from equal taxation; for if you exempt the property of any church organization, to that extent you impose a tax upon the whole community.

The wizards held that, as servants of a higher truth, they were not subject to the mundane laws of the city. The Patrician said that, indeed, this was the case, but they would bloody well pay their taxes like everyone else. The wizards said that, as followers of the light of wisdom, they owed allegiance to no mortal man. The Patrician said that this may well be true but they also owed a city tax of two hundred dollars per head per annum, payable quarterly. The wizards said that the University stood on magical ground and was therefore exempt from taxation and anyway you couldn’t put a tax on knowledge. The Patrician said you could. It was two hundred dollars per capita; if per capita was a problem, de-capita could be arranged.

Church controls what government doesn’t,” Mark elaborated. “And government controls churches through the 501(3)(C) tax exemption. Any church that fails to follow government mandate dictating what they can say and who to support loses their tax- exempt status. The churches have become the ‘great whore’ as the Bible6 predicted.

In serving others, the church will save itself from becoming nothing more than a spiritualized 501c3 not-for-profit, self-centered corporation, organized for the benefit of donor tax exemption. Serving others will remind us of our identity and call us out from this self-absorbed, selfish world to be the people of God on a journey following his Son, Jesus.

Many people today think that the Tea Act—which led to the Boston Tea Party—was simply an increase in the taxes on tea paid by the American colonists. That's where the whole "Taxation Without Representation" meme came from. Instead, the purpose of the Tea Act was to give the East India Company full and unlimited access to the American tea trade and to exempt the company from having to pay taxes to Britain on tea exported to the American colonies. It even gave the company a tax refund on millions of pounds of tea that it was unable to sell and holding in inventory. In other words, the Tea Act was the largest corporate tax break in the history of the world.

If Americans actually understood the structure of our taxes, they would not only become angry, they might also find our economic and political systems intolerable because they are the cause of our unjust tax codes ... We could revolutionize the financial conditions of every American city and town—solve all or most of its tax revenue problems—if the property tax system were simply extended from tangible property to also include intangible property. If you want some quick solutions to our nation's fiscal problems, that would be one. Even on the simple basis of fairness, how can we justify having a property tax system that exempts the intangible property owned mostly by the richest amongst us? What a prime example of the Occupy movement's central point about the economic injustice perpetrated by the 1 percent against the 99 percent.

A religion without followers is just a weird guy with strange ideas.

Having your own church doesn't make you a good guy. It only makes you tax-exempt.

Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions or property in geometrical progression as they rise. Whenever there are in any country uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on. Letter to James Madison, October 28, 1785

So let me get this straight – this is a long sentence. We are going to be gifted with a health care plan that we are forced to purchase, and fined if we don’t, which reportedly covers 10 million more people without adding a single new doctor, but provides for 16,000 new IRS agents, written by a committee whose chairman doesn’t understand it, passed by Congress, that didn’t read it, but exempted themselves from it, and signed by a president who smokes, with funding administered by a treasury chief who didn’t pay his taxes, for which we will be taxed for four years before any benefits take effect, by a government which has bankrupted Social Security and Medicare, all to be overseen by a surgeon general who is obese and financed by a country that is broke. So what the blank could possibly go wrong?

Has an atheist ever knocked on your door in the middle of the day to tell you "the good news" ... that all that stuff you learned about Jesus curing lepers and rising from the dead is just a bunch of bullshit??? Has an atheist ever tried to force a pamphlet on you at a bus stop? Have you ever seen an atheist carrying a sign declaring that Jesus "isn't" coming soon? Do atheists get tax exemptions? Why do religious fanatics always insist that they're the ones being victimized? "IN GOD WE TRUST" is printed on our currency. The birthday of your "savior" is a national holiday celebrated ad nauseum. What more would you like??? If your faith is so tenuous that it can't withstand criticism or even mockery, what does it say about your faith? About you? If you're truly a person of faith, why do you care so much about the opinion of others?

The religious right is one of the most politically militant voting blocs in the country and the agenda is clear (a gun in every uterus). Time we stopped subsidizing the anti-abortion movement in the form of tax-exemptions.

The relationship between the University and the Patrician, absolute ruler and nearly benevolent dictator of Ankh-Morpork, was a complex and subtle one. The wizards held that, as servants of a higher truth, they were not subject to the mundane laws of the city. The Patrician said that, indeed, this was the case, but they would bloody well pay their taxes like everyone else. The wizards said that, as followers of the light of wisdom, they owed allegiance to no mortal man. The Patrician said that this may well be true but they also owed a city tax of two hundred dollars per head per annum, payable quarterly. The wizards said that the University stood on magical ground and was therefore exempt from taxation and anyway you couldn't put a tax on knowledge. The Patrician said you could. It was two hundred dollars per capita; if per capita was a problem, decapita could be arranged. The wizards said that the University had never paid taxes to the civil authority. The Patrician said that he was not proposing to remain civil for long. The wizards said, what about easy terms? The Patrician said he was talking about easy terms. They wouldn't want to know about the hard terms. The wizards said that there was a ruler back in , oh, it would be the Century of the Dragonfly, who had tried to tell the University what to do. The Patrician could come and have a look at him if he liked. The Patrician said that he would. He truly would In the end it was agreed that while the wizards of course paid no taxes, they would nevertheless make an entirely voluntary donation of, oh, let's say two hundred dollars per head, without prejudice, mutatis mutandis, no strings attached, to be used strictly for non-militaristic and environmentally-acceptable purposes.

Nothing will ever befall me that I will receive with gloom or a bad disposition. I will pay my taxes gladly. Now, all the things which cause complaint or dread are like the taxes of life – things from which, my dear Lucilius, you should never hope from exemption or seek escape

The wizards said that the University stood on magical ground and was therefore exempt from taxation and anyway you couldn’t put a tax on knowledge. The Patrician said you could. It was two hundred dollars per capita; if per capita was a problem, decapita could be arranged. The

Plunder by force or subterfuge is called theft, larceny, burglary, swindling. Plunder under color of law can take the form of ‘economic regulation’, ‘too big to fail’, ‘corporate subsidies’, bail-outs, tax exemptions, and a plethora of other noble-sounding, but ultimately self-serving programs.

I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable. But the consequences of this enormous inequality [in Europe] producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property,...[One] means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise.

You don’t want atheism shoved down your throat? OK. We will stock knocking on doors spreading our ‘Truth,’ and having tax-exempt organizations dedicated to atheism that have influential political action committees. We will also stop printing ‘In atheism we trust’ on all US currency and saying, ‘One nation, under atheism” in the pledge of allegiance. We will also stop insisting that everyone who disagrees with us will be sentence to eternal damnation… Wait…

1. The economic wave of liberalization that began in the 1980s has achieved global proportions after the fall of Communism. Markets became free from all state constraints and capital could now move across borders with ease. Multinational corporations could move from country to country in their quest for cheap labour and tax exemptions.

It appears that no one is so unfortunate that he or she is exempt from spending cuts, while at the same time no one is so fortunate as to be ineligible for a tax cut

[W]hen the emperor Constantine abruptly changed Roman policy from one of persecuting Christians to protecting and favoring them with massive gifts of money, tax exemptions, and enormous prestige, the bishops, now in political favor, sometimes used these new resources to promote unanimity; thus in 381, the Christian emperor Theodosius made "heresy" a crime against the state.

Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse. And if we chance to forget what that must have been like, we have only to look at those states and societies where the clergy still has the power to dictate its own terms. The pathetic vestiges of this can still be seen, in modern societies, in the efforts made by religion to secure control over education, or to exempt itself from tax, or to pass laws forbidding people to insult its omnipotent and omniscient deity, or even his prophet.

She had been sent here as an emissary by one of her former students, who also happened to be both her landlord and her actual lord. Saan, the Duke of Shulan, wanted her to appraise how the Prophesied Hero of the Tiandi’s education was coming along. She had wanted to refuse the assignment, but the terms were too good to pass up: tax exemption for life and not going to jail for refusing her duke. Taishi was not a big fan of taxes or imprisonment.

They can vote for every possible war that comes along and still be “pro-life,” while a levy that applies only to the vast fortunes left by the richest 1 percent of Americans when a spousal exemption is claimed is the “death tax.

When wealthy people create foundations, they’re exempt from paying taxes on their wealth. Thus foundations essentially rob the public of monies that should be owed to them and give back very little of what is taken in lost taxes. In addition, their funds are derived from profits resulting from the exploitation of labor. That is, corporations become rich by exploiting their workers. Corporate profits are then put into foundations in order to provide “relief” to workers that are the result of corporate practices in the first place.

There were some legal boundaries. By law, tax-exempt charities, which the IRS designates as 501(c)(3)s, must refrain from involvement in lobbying and electoral politics and serve the public rather than their donors’ interests. But such laws are rarely enforced and are subject to flexible interpretation.

Nothing will ever befall me that I will receive with gloom or a bad disposition. I will pay my taxes gladly. Now, all the things which cause complaint or dread are like the taxes of life—things from which, my dear Lucilius, you should never hope for exemption or seek escape.” —SENECA, MORAL LETTERS, 96.2

To promote trade along these routes, Mongol authorities distributed an early type of combined passport and credit card. The Mongol paiza was a tablet of gold, silver, or wood larger than a man’s hand, and it would be worn on a chain around the neck or attached to the clothing. Depending on which metal was used and the symbols such as tigers or gyrfalcons, illiterate people could ascertain the importance of the traveler and thereby render the appropriate level of service. The paiza allowed the holder to travel throughout the empire and be assured of protection, accommodations, transportation, and exemption from local taxes or duties.

First, private schools and universities should lose their tax-exempt status unless they draw at least half of their students from families in the bottom two-thirds of the income distribution. And second, schools should be encouraged (including through public subsidies) to meet this requirement by expanding enrollments.

Sometimes when a father has an ugly, loutish son, the love he bears him so blindfolds his eyes that he does not see his defects, or, rather, takes them for gifts and charms of mind and body, and talks of them to his friends as wit and grace. I, however—for though I pass for the father, I am but the stepfather to "Don Quixote"—have no desire to go with the current of custom, or to implore thee, dearest reader, almost with tears in my eyes, as others do, to pardon or excuse the defects thou wilt perceive in this child of mine. Thou art neither its kinsman nor its friend, thy soul is thine own and thy will as free as any man's, whate'er he be, thou art in thine own house and master of it as much as the king of his taxes and thou knowest the common saying, "Under my cloak I kill the king;" all which exempts and frees thee from every consideration and obligation, and thou canst say what thou wilt of the story without fear of being abused for any ill or rewarded for any good thou mayest say of it.

The first law of the land shall be the King’s Peace,” King Aegon decreed, “and any lord who goes to war without my leave shall be considered a rebel and an enemy of the Iron Throne.” King Aegon also issued decrees regularizing customs, duties, and taxes throughout the realm, whereas previously every port and every petty lord had been free to exact however much they could from tenants, smallfolk, and merchants. He also proclaimed that the holy men and women of the Faith, and all their lands and possessions, were to be exempt from taxation, and affirmed the right of the Faith’s own courts to try and sentence any septon, Sworn Brother, or holy sister accused of malfeasance.

The truth is that I'm a bad person. But, that's gonna change - I'm going to change. This is the last of that sort of thing. Now I'm cleaning up and I'm moving on, going straight and choosing life. I'm looking forward to it already. I'm gonna be just like you. The job, the family, the fucking big television. The washing machine, the car, the compact disc and electric tin opener, good health, low cholesterol, dental insurance, mortgage, starter home, leisure wear, luggage, three piece suite, DIY, game shows, junk food, children, walks in the park, nine to five, good at golf, washing the car, choice of sweaters, family Christmas, indexed pension, tax exemption, clearing gutters, getting by, looking ahead, the day you die.

Moreover, poor people are never opposed to big government because they’re exempt from all the annoying things that government does. They’re not worried about taxes: The government is not going to raise any taxes that they pay. They drive unlicensed cars, have no insurance, flee accidents, and couldn’t pay a court judgment anyway. The government doesn’t want to get in touch with the poor for any reason other than to give them things.

Income and inheritance taxes imply the denial of private property, and in that are different in principle from all other taxes. The government says to the citizen: “Your earnings are not exclusively your own; we have a claim on them, and our claim precedes yours; we will allow you to keep some of it, because we recognize your need, not your right; but whatever we grant you for yourself is for us to decide.” This is no exaggeration. Take a look at the income-tax report that you are required by law to make out, and you will see that the government arbitrarily sets down the amount of your income you may have for your living, for your business requirements, for the maintenance of your family, for medical expenses, and so on. After granting these exemptions, with a flourish of generosity, the government decides what percentage of the remainder it will appropriate. The rest you may have.

Who cheats? Well, just about anyone, if the stakes are right. You might say to yourself, I don’t cheat, regardless of the stakes. And then you might remember the time you cheated on, say, a board game. Last week. Or the golf ball you nudged out of its bad lie. Or the time you really wanted a bagel in the office break room but couldn’t come up with the dollar you were supposed to drop in the coffee can. And then took the bagel anyway. And told yourself you’d pay double the next time. And didn’t. For every clever person who goes to the trouble of creating an incentive scheme, there is an army of people, clever and otherwise, who will inevitably spend even more time trying to beat it. Cheating may or may not be human nature, but it is certainly a prominent feature in just about every human endeavor. Cheating is a primordial economic act: getting more for less. So it isn’t just the boldface names — inside-trading CEOs and pill-popping ballplayers and perkabusing politicians — who cheat. It is the waitress who pockets her tips instead of pooling them. It is the Wal-Mart payroll manager who goes into the computer and shaves his employees’ hours to make his own performance look better. It is the third grader who, worried about not making it to the fourth grade, copies test answers from the kid sitting next to him. Some cheating leaves barely a shadow of evidence. In other cases, the evidence is massive. Consider what happened one spring evening at midnight in 1987: seven million American children suddenly disappeared. The worst kidnapping wave in history? Hardly. It was the night of April 15, and the Internal Revenue Service had just changed a rule. Instead of merely listing the name of each dependent child, tax filers were now required to provide a Social Security number. Suddenly, seven million children — children who had existed only as phantom exemptions on the previous year’s 1040 forms — vanished, representing about one in ten of all dependent children in the United States.

The tax-exempt organization quietly cemented a deal with Glenn Beck, the incendiary right-wing Fox News television host who at the time was a Tea Party superstar. For an annual payment that eventually topped $1 million, Beck read “embedded content” written by the FreedomWorks staff. They told him what to say on the air, and he blended the promotional material seamlessly into his monologue, making it sound as if it were his own opinion. The arrangement was described on FreedomWorks’ tax disclosures as “advertising services.

On Atheism – If people continue to think of atheism as a kind of religion, then I demand all the perks that real religions get. I want to build big empty buildings where like-minded people can gather once a week to debate a non-existent deity. I want tax-exempt status. I want real food, not cheap wine and crackers. I want a rocking band. I want altar men! Not altar boys—altar MEN—and I want them to look like the chain-clad guy who hands an envelope to RuPaul at the beginning of “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar”.

We have always called ourselves a tax-exempt 501c3 antiprofit organization. We wrestle to free ourselves from macrocharity and distant acts of charity that serve to legitimize apathetic lifestyles of good intentions but rob us of the gift of community. We visit rich people and have them visit us. We preach, prophesy, and dream together about how to awaken the church from her violent slumber. Sometimes we speak to change the world; other times we speak to keep the world from changing us. We are about ending poverty, not simply managing it. We give people fish. We teach them to fish. We tear down the walls that have been built up around the fish pond. And we figure out who polluted it. We fight terrorism—the terrorism within each of us, the terrorism of corporate greed, of American consumerism, of war. We are not pacifist hippies but passionate lovers who abhor passivity and violence. We spend our lives actively resisting everything that destroys life, whether that be terrorism or the war on terrorism. We try to make the world safe, knowing that the world will never be safe as long as millions live in poverty so the few can live as they wish. We believe in another way of life—the kingdom of God—which stands in opposition to the principalities, powers, and rulers of this dark world (Eph. 6:12).3

So how did it come to this? Why did the Australian government have to provide a protection visa for José on the grounds that a religious organisation it deems a tax-exempt charity had trafficked him? How could a church that claims to believe in freedom and human rights enslave and traffic its members? How could a church that in its own religious creed says ‘that all men have inalienable rights to their own lives’ separate a loving couple who wanted to get married and have a child, and force the woman to have an abortion? How could a church use Australia as a penal colony in the 21st century? To understand the madness of modern-day Scientology, you need to go back to the source, and the thinking that marked its very beginning.

The real catalyst for the Religious Right was a court decision, but it was not Roe v. Wade. It was a lower court ruling in the District Court for the District of Columbia in a case called Green v. Connally. On June 30, 1971, the court ruled that any organization that engaged in racial segregation or racial discrimination was not by definition a charitable institution, and therefore it had no claims on tax-exempt status. The Supreme Court’s Coit v. Green decision upheld the district court, and the Internal Revenue Service then began making inquiries about the racial policies of so-called segregation academies as well as the fundamentalist school Bob Jones University, in Greenville, South Carolina, which boasted a long history of racial exclusion.

If government had declined to build racially separate public housing in cities where segregation hadn’t previously taken root, and instead had scattered integrated developments throughout the community, those cities might have developed in a less racially toxic fashion, with fewer desperate ghettos and more diverse suburbs. If the federal government had not urged suburbs to adopt exclusionary zoning laws, white flight would have been minimized because there would have been fewer racially exclusive suburbs to which frightened homeowners could flee. If the government had told developers that they could have FHA guarantees only if the homes they built were open to all, integrated working-class suburbs would likely have matured with both African Americans and whites sharing the benefits. If state courts had not blessed private discrimination by ordering the eviction of African American homeowners in neighborhoods where association rules and restrictive covenants barred their residence, middle-class African Americans would have been able gradually to integrate previously white communities as they developed the financial means to do so. If churches, universities, and hospitals had faced loss of tax-exempt status for their promotion of restrictive covenants, they most likely would have refrained from such activity. If police had arrested, rather than encouraged, leaders of mob violence when African Americans moved into previously white neighborhoods, racial transitions would have been smoother. If state real estate commissions had denied licenses to brokers who claimed an “ethical” obligation to impose segregation, those brokers might have guided the evolution of interracial neighborhoods. If school boards had not placed schools and drawn attendance boundaries to ensure the separation of black and white pupils, families might not have had to relocate to have access to education for their children. If federal and state highway planners had not used urban interstates to demolish African American neighborhoods and force their residents deeper into urban ghettos, black impoverishment would have lessened, and some displaced families might have accumulated the resources to improve their housing and its location. If government had given African Americans the same labor-market rights that other citizens enjoyed, African American working-class families would not have been trapped in lower-income minority communities, from lack of funds to live elsewhere. If the federal government had not exploited the racial boundaries it had created in metropolitan areas, by spending billions on tax breaks for single-family suburban homeowners, while failing to spend adequate funds on transportation networks that could bring African Americans to job opportunities, the inequality on which segregation feeds would have diminished. If federal programs were not, even to this day, reinforcing racial isolation by disproportionately directing low-income African Americans who receive housing assistance into the segregated neighborhoods that government had previously established, we might see many more inclusive communities. Undoing the effects of de jure segregation will be incomparably difficult. To make a start, we will first have to contemplate what we have collectively done and, on behalf of our government, accept responsibility.

After that preacher told me to quit thinking, I began thinking harder. I did my research. Turns out, the memo he was trying to pass me—“A good Christian bases her faith on disapproving of gays and abortion”—started being issued only forty years ago. In the 1970s, a few rich, powerful, white, (outwardly) straight men got worried about losing their right to continue racially segregating their private Christian schools and maintaining their tax-exempt status. Those men began to feel their money and power being threatened by the civil rights movement. In order to regain control, they needed to identify an issue that would be emotional and galvanizing enough to unite and politically activate their evangelical followers for the first time. They decided to focus on abortion. Before then—a full six years after the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision—the prevailing evangelical position was that life began with the baby’s first breath, at birth. Most evangelical leaders had been indifferent to the Court’s decision in Roe, and some were cited as supporting the ruling. Not anymore. They wrote a new memo using freshly feigned outrage and rhetoric calling for “a holy war…to lead the nation back to the moral stance that made America great.” They sponsored a meeting of 15,000 pastors—called The Religious Roundtable—to train pastors on how to convince their congregations to vote for antichoice, antigay candidates. This is how they disseminated the memo down to evangelical ministers, who passed it down to pews across America. The memo read, To be aligned with Jesus, to have family values, to be moral, one must be against abortion and gay people and vote for the candidate that is antiabortion and antigay.

That the petitioner No. 2 is the founder President of an Institution, namely, “ Institute for Re-writing Indian (and World) History “. The aim and objective of that institution, which is a registered society having register no. F-1128 (T) as the public trust under the provision of Bombay Public Trust Act. Inter alia, is to re-discover the Indian history. The monumental places of historical importance in their real and true perspective having of the heritage of India. The true copy of memorandum of association of the aforesaid society / public trust having fundamental objectives along with Income tax exemption certificate under section 80-G (5) of I.T. Act, 1961 for period 1/4/2003 to 31/3/2006 are filed herewith as marked as Annexure No.1 and 2 to the writ petition. 5. That the founder-President of Petitioner’s Institution namely Shri P. N. Oak is a National born Citizen of India. He resides permanently at the address given in case title. The petitioner is a renowned author of 13 renowned books including the books, titled as, “ The Taj Mahal is a Temple Place”. This petition is related to Taj Mahal, Fatehpur- Sikiri, Red-fort at Agra, Etamaudaula, Jama- Masjid at Agra and other so called other monuments. All his books are the result of his long-standing research and unique rediscovery in the respective fields. The titles of his books speak well about the contents of the subject. His Critical analysis, dispassionate, scientific approach and reappraisal of facts and figures by using recognised tools used in the field gave him distinction through out the world. The true copy of the title page of book namely “The Taj Mahal is a Temple Palace” . written by Sri P. N. Oak, the author/ petitioner No. 2 is filed as Annexure –3 to this writ petition.

In her book The Government-Citizen Disconnect, the political scientist Suzanne Mettler reports that 96 percent of American adults have relied on a major government program at some point in their lives. Rich, middle-class, and poor families depend on different kinds of programs, but the average rich and middle-class family draws on the same number of government benefits as the average poor family. Student loans look like they were issued from a bank, but the only reason banks hand out money to eighteen-year-olds with no jobs, no credit, and no collateral is because the federal government guarantees the loans and pays half their interest. Financial advisers at Edward Jones or Prudential can help you sign up for 529 college savings plans, but those plans' generous tax benefits will cost the federal government an estimated $28.5 billion between 2017 and 2026. For most Americans under the age of sixty-five, health insurance appears to come from their jobs, but supporting this arrangement is one of the single largest tax breaks issued by the federal government, one that exempts the cost of employer-sponsored health insurance from taxable incomes. In 2022, this benefit is estimated to have cost the government $316 billion for those under sixty-five. By 2032, its price tag is projected to exceed $6oo billion. Almost half of all Americans receive government-subsidized health benefits through their employers, and over a third are enrolled in government-subsidized retirement benefits. These participation rates, driven primarily by rich and middle-class Americans, far exceed those of even the largest programs directed at low income families, such as food stamps (14 percent of Americans) and the Earned Income Tax Credit (19 percent). Altogether, the United States spent $1.8 trillion on tax breaks in 2021. That amount exceeded total spending on law enforcement, education, housing, healthcare, diplomacy, and everything else that makes up our discretionary budget. Roughly half the benefits of the thirteen largest individual tax breaks accrue to the richest families, those with incomes that put them in the top 20 percent. The top I percent of income earners take home more than all middle-class families and double that of families in the bottom 20 percent. I can't tell you how many times someone has informed me that we should reduce military spending and redirect the savings to the poor. When this suggestion is made in a public venue, it always garners applause. I've met far fewer people who have suggested we boost aid to the poor by reducing tax breaks that mostly benefit the upper class, even though we spend over twice as much on them as on the military and national defense.

Rich, middle-class, and poor families depend on different kinds of programs, but the average rich and middle-class family draws on the same number of government benefits as the average poor family. Student loans look like they were issued from a bank, but the only reason banks hand out money to eighteen-year-olds with no jobs, no credit, and no collateral is because the federal government guarantees the loans and pays half their interest. Financial advisers at Edward Jones or Prudential can help you sign up for 529 college savings plans, but those plans’ generous tax benefits will cost the federal government an estimated $28.5 billion between 2017 and 2026. For most Americans under the age of sixty-five, health insurance appears to come from their jobs, but supporting this arrangement is one of the single largest tax breaks issued by the federal government, one that exempts the cost of employer-sponsored health insurance from taxable incomes.

From a superficial perspective, tax-exempt bonds appear to offer investors the opportunity to place fixed-income assets in taxable accounts (where their special tax characteristics lessen or eliminate tax consequences), freeing capacity in tax-deferred accounts for higher-tax-burdened assets. Regrettably, the problems of credit risk and callability lessen the appeal of tax-exempt bonds to investors.

When he came to study the country’s inequitable tax system, though, Necker was faced with complicated and intractable problems which he was quite incapable of resolving. The various taxes and duties levied in France – the gabelle, the traites, the aides as well as the capitation and the vingtièmes–were all, as he discovered, subject to variations, exemptions, inequalities in distribution and abuses in collection that made the evils of the system one of the principal causes of social unrest. Yet the increasing expenses of government and public works and the costs of the country’s wars – in particular France’s participation in the War of American Independence which involved expenditure of about 2,000 million livres–rendered the collection of further and more burdensome taxes inevitable unless the state were to slide ever deeper into bankruptcy.

As much as the Christian right of the twenty-first century is now fixated on abortion and sexual politics, the backlash against the efforts of the federal government to desegregate tax-exempt private schools is embedded in the movement’s DNA. The white evangelical attraction to Trump was not in spite of his extended birther crusade against Barack Obama, his racist outbursts in tweets and rallies, and his administration’s plans to eviscerate federal protection of racial minorities from discrimination in housing and education by eliminating their ability to show discrimination based on the disparate impact of a policy, as opposed to having to prove discriminatory intent. The Christian right movement was born out of grievance against civil rights gains for blacks, and a backlash against the government’s efforts to ensure those gains could endure. When Trump offers paeans to “religious freedom”—the very clarion call of the Bob Jones University defenders—or sloganeers “Make America Great Again,” he is sending a message that rings true for a movement driven by the rhetoric and organizing pioneered by Weyrich and Billings. Trump’s white evangelical admirers do not just see a leader who is making it safe to say Merry Christmas again, or holding the IRS back from penalizing pastors who endorse him from the pulpit. In Trump’s words and deeds, they see an idealized white Christian America before civil rights for people of color—and a meddling government—ruined it.

Tax-Exempt Money-Market Funds

She had been sent here an emissary by one of her former students, who also happened to be both her landlord and her actual lord. Saan, the Duke of Shulan, wanted her to appraise how the Prophesied Hero of the Tiandi’s education was coming along. She had wanted to refuse the assignment, but the terms were too good to pass up: tax exemption for life and not going to jail for refusing her duke. Taishi was not a big fan of taxes or imprisonment.

With the first banks opened on Monday, the afternoon brought another request from Roosevelt. Stating that he needed the tax revenue, he asked Congress that beer with alcohol content of up to 3.2 percent be made legal; the Eighteenth Amendment did not specify the percentage that constituted an intoxicating beverage. Congress complied. The House passed the bill the very next day with a vote count of 316–97, pushing it to the Senate. Wednesday brought good cheer: The stock market opened for the first time in Roosevelt’s presidency. In a single-day record, the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained over 15 percent—a gain in total market value of $3 billion. By Thursday, for increased fiscal prudence, the Senate had added an exemption for wine to go with beer, but negotiated the alcohol content down to 3.05 percent. Throughout the week, banks were receiving net deposits rather than facing panicked withdrawals. Over the following weeks, the administration developed a sweeping farm package designed to “increase purchasing power of our farmers” and “relieve the pressure of farm mortgages.” To guarantee the safety of bank deposits, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation was created. To regulate the entire American stock and bond markets, the Exchange Act of 1933 required companies to report their financial condition accurately to the buying public, establishing the Securities and Exchange Commission. Safety nets such as Social Security for retirement and home loan guarantees for individuals would be added to the government’s portfolio of responsibilities within a couple of years. It was the largest peacetime escalation of government in American history.

There were no peasants doffing their hats here; no one was exempt from paying taxes; all men, in fact, were born equal.

The worst kidnapping wave in history? Hardly. It was the night of April 15, and the Internal Revenue Service had just changed a rule. Instead of merely listing the name of each dependent child, tax filers were now required to provide a Social Security number. Suddenly, seven million children—children who had existed only as phantom exemptions on the previous year’s 1040 forms—vanished, representing about one in ten of all dependent children in the United States.

Next, I went undercover—really!—in Dothan, Alabama, to expose segregated schools that were trying to evade integration. Posing as the young wife of a businessman who had just been transferred to the area, I visited the all-white private school that had just opened in town and received tax-exempt status. When I started asking questions about the student body and curriculum, I was assured that no black students would be enrolled. Marian used the evidence that I and other activists gathered in the field to pressure the Nixon administration to crack down on these so-called segregated academies.

As the 2019 elections were approaching, the Modi government felt the need to appear less pro-rich and more pro-poor again. But the union budget passed in February was somewhat a missed opportunity so far as the peasants were concerned. No loan waivers were announced in their favor, simply an enhanced interest subvention on loans and an annual income support of Rs 6,000 (80 USD)—6 percent of a small farmer’s yearly income—to all farmers’ households owning two hectares or fewer.131 In fact, the union budget was once again more geared to pleasing the middle class. The income tax exemption limit jumped from Rs 200,000 (2,667 USD) to 250,000 (3,333 USD), and the income tax rate up to Rs 5 lakh (6,667 USD) was reduced from 10 to 5 percent. The income tax on an income of Rs 10 lakh (13,333 USD) dropped from Rs 110,210 (1,470 USD) to Rs 75,000 (1,000 USD).132 The poor were doubly affected by the fiscal policy of the Modi government in 2014–2019: not only did the tax cuts in favor of the middle class, the abolition of the wealth tax, and, more importantly, the reduction of the corporate tax rates have to be offset by increased indirect taxes, but the stagnation of fiscal resources did not allow the government of India to spend more on public education and public health—all the more so as Narendra Modi wanted to reduce the fiscal deficit. First of all, tax collection diminished. The exchequer “lost” Rs 1.45 lakh crore (1.933 billion USD) in the reduction of the corporate tax, for instance. That was the main reason why gross direct tax collection dipped 4.92 percent133 in 2019–2020, a fiscal year during which gross tax collections were less than those in 2018–2019. Tax collections had never declined on a year-on-year basis since 1961–1962.134 Second, government expenditures diminished. The central government reduced its spending on education from 0.63 percent of GDP in 2013–2014 to 0.47 percent in 2017–2018. The trend was marginally better on the public health front, where the Center’s spending declined from 0.37 percent of GDP in 2013–2014 to 0.34 percent in 2015–2016, before rising again to reach 0.38 percent in 2016–2017.

First, private schools and universities should lose their tax-exempt status unless they draw at least half of their students from families in the bottom two-thirds of the income distribution. And second, schools should be encouraged (including through public subsidies) to meet this requirement by expanding enrollments. Together, these reforms would exchange meritocracy’s exclusive, narrow, and profligately educated elite for an inclusive, broad, and yet still well-educated replacement. The reforms would spread the wealth that the meritocratic inheritance now concentrates, distributing “elite” education across a wider population and at the same time improving education generally by reducing the strain on resources outside the elite. In this way, they would dramatically shrink the educational gap between the rich and the rest.

Under his auspices, the Church was soon exempted from taxes and its hierarchy started to be richly rewarded. Bishops were paid five times as much as professors, six times as much as doctors—as much even as a local governor. Eternal delight in the next life, bureaucratic preferment in this. What more could one wish for?

To promote all religions, Genghis Khan exempted religious leaders and their property from taxation and from all types of public service. To promote related professions, he later extended the same tax exemptions to a range of professionals who provided essential public services, including undertakers, doctors, lawyers, teachers, and scholars.

Nevertheless, during his short reign, King Lunalilo enacted laws that would change the course of Hawaiʻi’s history forever. In a move that was considered very divisive, King Lunalilo offered to exchange the lagoon of Pearl Harbor to the United States in exchange for the exemption of taxes on a number of Hawaiian goods that were exported to the United States, mainly sugar. However, the king withdrew the offer before it was deemed official due to significant pushback from the other aliʻi and the general public. This event showed that the people and rulers of Hawaiʻi harbored deep feelings of distrust, bitterness, and suspicion toward foreign involvement and land treaties. Additionally, King Lunalilo behaved contrary to King Kamehameha V’s example by electing three American ministers to seats of power and by cooperating and associating himself with the missionaries.

Investors can benefit from tax exemption on capital gain Bonds under Section 54EC of the Income Tax Act 1961 by investing in 54EC capital gain bonds. So invest now with RR Finance.

These were the men who, during the “Middle Ages of American industry,” the half century of unbridled industrial expansion following the Civil War, had harnessed America’s vast mineral resources and tapped its long-stored capital to create needed industrial growth but who, to turn that growth into personal wealth, had stationed themselves at the “narrows” of production, the key points of production and distribution, and exacted tribute from the nation. They were the men who had blackmailed state legislatures and city councils by threatening to build their railroad lines elsewhere unless they received tax exemptions, outright gifts of cash—and land grants so vast that, by 1920, the elected representatives of America had turned over to the railroad barons an area the size of Texas. They were the men who had bribed and corrupted legislators—the Standard Oil Company, one historian said, did everything possible to the Pennsylvania Legislature except refine it—to let them loot the nation’s oil and ore, the men who, building their empires on the toil of millions of immigrant laborers, had kept wages low, hours long, and had crushed the unions. Their creed was summed up in two quotes: Commodore Vanderbilt’s “Law? What do I care for law? Hain’t I got the power?” and J. P. Morgan’s “I owe the public nothing.

Control of trade was sought by specifying that no ships should "break boulke [bulk] or make privatt sales of any comodities" before reaching Jamestown. Taxes were not ignored either for a levy of ten pounds of tobacco, already the common currency it appears, was laid on each male above 16 years of age to help defray the "publique depte [debt]." Lest it be forgotten, it was enacted that obedience was required "to the presente government." Old planters were given special exemption from public service, "they and theire posteritie," while Burgesses were rendered exempt from seizure during Assembly time. "Persones of qualitie" when found delinquent, it was stated, could be imprisoned if not fit to take corporal punishment. It is of note that service to the Governor, or the public, was made contingent on Assembly consent. Of particular interest, too, was the action on the principle of taxation. It was bold, indeed, at this time for the Assembly to declare that; The Governor shall not laye any taxes or impositiones uppon the Colony, theire landes or comodities otherwi[se] then by the awthoritie of the Generall Assemblie, to be levied and imployed as the saide Assembly shall appoint. This was an early word on taxation, but it was to be far from the last word in the next century and a half.

End corporate welfare—including hidden subsidies. We explained in earlier chapters how the government too often, rather than helping people who need assistance, spends its valuable money helping corporations, through corporate welfare. Many of the subsidies are buried in the tax code. While all the loopholes, exceptions, exemptions, and preferences reduce the progressivity of the tax system and distort incentives, this is especially true of corporate welfare. Corporations that can’t make it on their own should come to an end. Their workers may need assistance moving to another occupation, but that’s a matter far different from corporate welfare. Much of corporate welfare is far from transparent—perhaps because if citizens really knew how much they were giving away, they would not allow it. Beyond the corporate welfare embedded in the tax code is that embedded in cheap credit and government loan guarantees. Among the most dangerous forms of corporate welfare are ones that limit liability for the damage the industries can cause—whether it’s limited liability for nuclear power plants or for the environmental damage of the oil industry. Not bearing the full cost of one’s action is an implicit subsidy, so all those industries that impose, for instance, environmental costs on others are, in effect, being subsidized. Like so many of the other reforms discussed in this section, these would have a triple benefit: a more efficient economy, fewer of the excesses at the top, improved well-being for the rest of the economy. Legal

In Uganda, as in other parts of Africa, the natives pay taxes. But any man with five children, all by the same wife, is exempt until his oldest child is ten. After that he must pay unless the same wife has another baby. In

In 1954, then-Senator (later Vice President, then President) Lyndon Baines Johnson wrote a piece of legislation, the Johnson Amendment, which would go a long way to silence the churches and synagogues who were not yet asleep at the switch. He would threaten the clergy with a response from the Internal Revenue Service if they were to take up social and political issues from their pulpits. This law, or threat, still stands today, and anyone holding a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status with the United States government knows that it has teeth that will bite hard should you test its veracity. The action taken by LBJ has effectively removed the voice of righteousness from the marketplace, and essentially it enables government to operate without a conscience.

it was the first time a major corporation used a tax-exempt nonprofit as a front group or, as he put it, “a cutout to secretly influence elections in a threatening way.” He said the Kochs showed that “you could dump a million dollars on someone’s head by using cutout

On Atheism – If people continue to think of atheism as a kind of religion, then I demand all the perks that real religions get. I want to build big empty buildings where like-minded people can gather once a week to debate a non-existent deity. I want tax-exempt status. I want real food, not cheap wine and crackers. I want a rocking band. I want altar men! Not altar boys—altar MEN—and I want them to look like the chain-clad guy who hands an envelope to RuPaul at the beginning of To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar.

Commoners already paid the lion’s share of national taxes and, because of these old feudal records, they now also paid a whole host of other duties to their local nobles (who, further inspiring anger, were exempt from most national taxes). Like the American Revolution before it, the French Revolution began as a tax revolt, and there were even rumors that King Louis XVI himself authorized the burning sprees because he felt the taxes on his people were unjustly high.

But the actual arguments advocated by Secretary Mellon had nothing to do with a “trickle-down theory.” Mellon pointed out that, under the high income tax rates at the end of the Woodrow Wilson administration in 1921, vast sums of money had been put into tax shelters such as tax-exempt municipal bonds, instead of being invested in the private economy, where this money would create more output, incomes and jobs.[8

We don’t simply have a problem when it comes to the amount of tax collected. We have a huge problem when it comes to the way we collect taxes. Take corporate taxes as an example. We impose taxes at the second highest rate in the rich world (35%), yet the corporate tax code is riddled with incentives, subsidies, exemptions, and loopholes.13 The result is crazy. We give firms a huge disincentive to earn money at home (because our basic tax rate is so high), while giving them huge incentives to play the system. And remember: the United States boasts some of the world’s most innovative and entrepreneurial companies. If we give those guys an incentive to find ways around our tax code, they’ll turn out to be world-beaters. World-beaters like General Electric, for example.14 GE earned $14.2 billion of profit in 2010, of which $5.1 billion was generated in the US. I’m guessing that you earned less than $5 billion that year, but I’m damn sure you had a more painful settlement with the taxman. In 2010, GE’s net corporation tax obligation to the US government was sub-zero. The firm actually derived a net benefit from the government. In the five years to 2010, GE accumulated $26 billion in American profits and booked a net benefit of $4.1 billion from the IRS. That’s completely insane. You don’t, however, need to be GE to outperform in this way. Big Oil can play the same game to almost equal effect. According to a Citizens for Tax Justice report out in 2011, ‘Over the past two years, Exxon Mobil reported $9,910 million in pretax US profits. But it enjoyed so many tax subsidies that its federal income tax bill was only $39 million‌—‌a tax rate of only 0.4%.’15

Americans have perfected the questionable art of what Suzann Mettler, a professor at Cornell University calls "the submerged state." -- making government policies invisible by administering them through private companies, or through the tax code, instead of just sending recipients checks. In reality tax deductions, credits and exemptions are government support for specific groups of people, in the form of tax dollars not collected, just as cash benefits are. However, many people don't perceive or acknowledge that reality, and wrongly assume that they're not benefiting from the government at all, even when they are.

In a study Suzanne Mettler asked 1,400 Americans whether they had used a government social program. Fifty-seven percent said they had not. Then she asked if they had used one of twenty-one specific federal policies, including child-care tax credits, the Earned Income Tax Credit, employer-sponsored and thus tax exempted health insurance, Medicare, Social Security, unemployment insurance, mortgage-interest deductions, and student loans. It turned out that 96 percent of those who had denied using government programs had in fact used at least one, and the average responder had used four. This clear disconnect between Americans' perception of who benefits from government programs and the reality makes it easier to keep demonizing the "welfare state.

organizations. The book introduces the unrelated business rules (including a history of and rationale for these rules), analyzes the meaning of the term trade or business and the factors taken into account in determining whether a business is related or unrelated, explores the many modifications and exceptions that enrich this part of exempt organizations law, and summarizes the unrelated debt-financed income rules and the doctrine of commerciality. This book delves much deeper than I could in the The Law of Tax-Exempt Organizations (Eight Edition) , digging into topics such as the special rules for social clubs, the advertising rules, the corporate sponsorship rules, and the application of this aspect of

This book is based, in part, on a spinoff of material previously published in various chapters of the Exempt Organizations book. It came about because of two diametrically competing considerations: my desire to provide much more detail about the federal tax law concerning related and unrelated businesses, and my ongoing efforts to reduce the size of the Exempt

If they can’t find those answers in your holy writings, they’ll move on to the next person’s holy writings.

People are looking for someone to tell them what to do and whether what they’re doing is good or bad.

Because most people don’t know that the little dagger symbol on the New York Times bestsellers list means that retailers have reported significant bulk orders, you can buy a bunch for the devoted, then handsell them yourself. If you can swing 100,000 copies, that’s usually enough to get you on the list, and from then on you’re not just a prophet but a New York Times bestselling author, too!

The various deities worshiped over the course of human history have very little in common except that all of them have an easily expressed identity and a clearly articulated mission statement.

Moreover, upon revelations that the Internal Revenue Service, under the president and his subordinates, had invidiously targeted conservative organizations for harassment and disparate treatment in the awarding of tax-exempt status (as further described in Article VII, below), the president’s subordinates at the Justice Department handpicked to run the investigation a prosecutor from the Civil Rights Division who is a partisan Democrat and a donor to both the president’s political campaigns and the Democratic National Committee.7

significant component of the federal law of tax-exempt organizations is the body of tax law concerning the

significant component of the federal law of tax-exempt organizations is the body of tax law concerning the conduct and taxation of unrelated trade

significant component of the federal law of tax-exempt organizations is the body of

Lois Lerner and the tea social gathering scandal In September 2013, following 4 months of public scrutiny, Lois Lerner resigned from her place within the IRS. Lerner had been placed on paid depart in Could the identical 12 months and was subject to a review board which seemed set to fireside her, the choice to resign was successfully forced upon her. While in the Internal Income Service, Lerner had been head of the exempt organizations division, which processed claims from groups making use Billie Lerner New York of for exemption from paying tax. This put her in command of over 900 IRS workers with a budget of practically $100 million. No matter happened to the times the place public officers had been on the level of wetting their pants after they had been caught even stepping on fly. Accountability has been thrown out of the window and this may be evidenced by the truth that in the last few years, not accountability review committee has really held anyone accountable for any improper doing and all they do is find scapegoats. As many would ask how much longer this might go on, Ms. Lerner may as nicely be given a star for her impeccable service to her nation. It is simply a looking out for our personal scenario. As anticipated, this has precipitated outrage among the lots. Before her retirement, Ms. Lerner was on a paid go away as investigations had been on going. After completion of investigations by the committee that was tasked with the responsibility it was really useful that Ms. Lerner be ousted for her participation within the scandal however within the common government model of irony, Ms. Lerner can be allowed to retire with full benefits. Investigations began quickly after and in 2013 the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration J. Russell George revealed that certainly the IRS personnel had used inappropriate standards for subjecting organizations to further scrutiny when making use of for tax exempt standing, particularly organizations using the word “Tea Get together.” The admission prompted an uproar of speculation and anger by Republicans, and shortly sufficient Director of the IRS Exempt Organizations division Lois Lerner was targeted as accountable for the scandal. Investigations and hearings followed cumulating in Lerner’s retirement in September 23, 2013.

The U.S. corporate-tax code is an ugly and unusual beast: It imposes the highest top rate in the developed world, but a swamp of political favoritism and exemptions ensures that many firms with friends in Washington pay relatively low corporate taxes—or none at all, in some years. Along with North Korea and Zimbabwe, the United States takes the highly unusual approach of taxing all of the non-U.S. operations of U.S.-based firms, meaning that American companies doing business in any given country abroad will always pay the higher tax rate as between that country and the United States. In addition to the taxes themselves, this imposes substantial compliance costs:

Interest on NRE and FCNR deposits are exempt from income tax in India. However, while explanation 2 of section 10 (15)(iv) mentions that “interest” includes hedging transaction charges on account of currency fluctuation, taxation of gain due to entering into forward contract may not be straight forward.

Any amount received on death is exempt from income tax in India. Normally,

Ms. Kalgi from Italy sold shares of Reliance Industries after 18 months of purchase for a gain of Rs. 1,000,000 and paid STT. As Reliance Industries is a listed company and the holding period is more than 12 months, it is considered as a LTCG. As STT was paid on sale of shares, the LTCG on sale of shares would be exempt from tax for Ms. Kalgi.

Mr. Keyur from Australia sold an equity mutual fund subject to STT after 18 months of purchase for a gain of Rs. 1,000,000. As STT is paid and the holding period is more than 12 months, the gain would be a LTCG and would be exempt from income tax in India.

Mr. Al Gul from Indonesia sold a residential property for 30,000,000 resulting in a LTGC after indexation of 10,000,000. He invested Rs. 5,000,000 in NHAI capital gain tax bonds and invested 5,000,000 in a residential property. He will be allowed to claim both exemptions – NHAI bonds and residential property. Thus, he would not pay any tax on Rs.10,000,000.

Can you buy more than one residential house and claim an exemption? When the exemption was introduced, it mentioned “a residential house”. It was held by various courts that “a residential house” also means more than one. Thus, if a joint family of a father and two sons living together sells the residential property owned by the father, they were allowed to buy 3 residential properties in the same building to claim the exemption as “a residential house”. However, it was not easy to prove as the taxpayer should have the patience to present his case at every level – Income Tax Officer, Commissioner of Income Tax, Tribunal and sometimes the High court. This has created a lot of controversies as well. The Finance Act (No 2) 2014 amended the provisions to allow exemption for investment in one residential house. Now, the taxpayer cannot invest in multiple residential properties for claiming exemption.

The dividend received is exempt from income tax in India provided the Dividend Distribution Tax (DDT) has been paid by the company distributing dividend. If the DDT has not been paid, the dividend income would be taxable.

For any equity investment, long term capital gain (>12 months) is exempt from tax whereas short term gain is taxed at 15% flat. For

While interest on an NRE deposit is exempt from tax, the interest on an NRO deposit is taxable and TDS @ 30% will be deducted. Investment

In India, dividend income is exempt from income tax for investors, provided the dividend distribution tax (DDT) is paid by the company or the mutual fund schemes declaring the dividend. While

Interest on the PPF account is exempt from income tax in India. Not only does an investment in a PPF account give the highest tax free income to residents, it is also allowed as a deduction u/s. 80C of the income tax act, thereby reducing the taxable income. Thus,

Dividend received from a mutual fund is exempt from tax for the investor. However, other than equity oriented MF schemes, Dividend Distribution Tax (DDT) is required to be paid by the MF schemes issuing the dividend. Please refer to DDT for more details.

Only long term capital gains on a MF which is subject to Security Transaction Tax (STT) are exempt from income tax. Any other

The five major sources of income which are exempt for NRIs are: Proceeds from Life Insurance Policy - provided the policy complies with the exemption criteria/conditions Dividend from a domestic company or mutual fund scheme - provided the company or mutual fund scheme has paid the Dividend Distribution Tax (DDT), if applicable Interest on an NRE account – provided the NRE account is maintained as per the FEMA rules Interest on FCNR or RFC accounts – provided the account owner is a non-resident or RBNOR under the Income Tax Act Long Term Capital Gain on equity and equity based mutual fund – provided the Security Transaction Tax (STT) has been paid

Special reliefs, exemptions and incentives have been provided in the Income Tax Act to NRIs/PIOs.

Even in the domain of conventional currencies, this trend is in evidence. Today, 14 U.S. states, namely, Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington, have taken action to create their own state currency, usually backed by a precious metal such as gold or silver.24 In the case of Utah, for example, the Utah Legislature has passed a bill allowing gold and silver coins to be used as legal tender in the state—and for the value of their precious metal, not just the face value of the coins. Utah’s bill allows stores to accept gold and silver coins as legal tender. It also exempts gold and silver transactions from the state’s capital gains tax, though that does not shield exchanges from federal taxes.