Some info about how the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints uses its donations:
https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/humanitaria...
I suspect most of its investments are targeted towards the same ends.
SEC charges the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
131–140 of 232 posts
Re: SEC charges the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
#132anti-Church pitchforks come out pretty fast here? it shows that some people simply want to eliminate Church itself, and use bad news to propel that point of view. why not address the actions themselves, specifically; plenty of crooks in the investment game, some of them use Church money it seems.
[flagged]
That link is about Jehovah's Witnesses. Different church.
Re: SEC charges the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
#133[flagged]
This is not a logical conclusion.
It's like saying, if Jeff Bezos is really so rich, why are Amazon warehouse employees not paid better? He must actually be poor and can only afford to pay people low salaries.
Re: SEC charges the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
#134One question I had while reading this: - Should non-profits be allowed to "invest" their tax-exempt donations? It seems that non-profits should obtain their funding through grants or donations. Investing, on the other hand, seems like the opposite of "non-profit" As a personal aside, I've recently been introduced to a few folks who seem to be doing extraordinarily well financially. It turns out that they all run "non…
Not to take a side, because you're right that there are a lot of ways people exploit this, but there are reasons why a charity may legitimately want to invest.
> Investing, on the other hand, seems like the opposite of "non-profit"
There's two ways to look at this. You can consider investing in the capitalist sense where you're trying to make money and profit, and maybe the managers exploit the system, but you can consider it in a different perspective: wealth preservation and time-deferral of resources to reduce economic dependency of donations.
For example, universities often have large endowments. Universities take in small streams of money which may fluctuate with the economy and occasional massive donations, and then once a decade build a very expensive building. They probably want to protect the monies in that constant stream from inflation and economic cycles until they need to build a new building. Beyond time-deferral of resources, sometimes universities (or alum) establish a fund that should pay out continuously for eg. scholarships. By donating $1M, you can provide a 50k payout (5%) to a student, forever, and see modest growth of the fund above that (eg. ~2%) to cover inflation. This ensures that a one-time act of charity can last more than a few years.
> I've recently been introduced to a few folks who seem to be doing extraordinarily well financially. It turns out that they all run "non-profits.
Yea, maybe we need to consider the exploitation of non-profit exemptions and how it can be "self serving". But consider an alternative story: rich parents give their kids a lot of money, so they don't need to work to pay bills. This frees them to work low-pay charitable jobs because they have a separate trust fund to cover cost of living.
Re: SEC charges the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
#135One question I had while reading this: - Should non-profits be allowed to "invest" their tax-exempt donations? It seems that non-profits should obtain their funding through grants or donations. Investing, on the other hand, seems like the opposite of "non-profit" As a personal aside, I've recently been introduced to a few folks who seem to be doing extraordinarily well financially. It turns out that they all run "non…
> Should non-profits be allowed to "invest" their tax-exempt donations?
Almost definitely yes because so many uses of funds are also investments. Ex: a church buys valuable real estate to use as their main site of worship.
However maybe the returns on investment should not be tax-exempt in perpetuity!
Re: SEC charges the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
The separation of church and state is not about preventing any kind of relationship between religious institutions and the government. Rather, it is about ensuring that the government does not establish an official state religion, and that it remains neutral towards different religious beliefs and practices.
If you decree your belief system is "God is DNA", can you set up a corp with different tax status to further investigate, buy property, and so on? I
You sure can if you follow the IRS's strict rules and requirements for granting tax-exempt status to religious organizations. I suspect you would have difficulty in demonstrating that the organization has a legitimate religious purpose and is organized and operated exclusively for that purpose. Creating a fake religion is likely to be viewed as fraud and could result in legal consequences.
Re: SEC charges the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Citation for that 99% figure? If it's anecdotal then I will give you my anecdote as a non Christian that I see 99% of churches doing charitable works.
As a member of the LDS church, the church absolutely does charitable work. The problem is that it doesn't do $32B worth of charitable work. Or anything close to it. And that , I think, is the problem.
Yeah I didn't say anything about the LDS church specifically, just that OP is talking about 99% of churches not being charities
Re: SEC charges the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you support with evidence the idea that Ensign Peak is just going to blow off the fine and pay 5MM every few years instead of filing 13Fs? Because if they start reliably filing 13Fs, they've refuted this argument. If there's a distinctive harm that we can draw out from the LDS Church failure to file 13Fs, I'm all ears about scaling up the penalties accordingly. But otherwise, the logic we're using applies to lite…
> Can you support with evidence the idea that Ensign Peak is just going to blow off the fine and pay 5MM every few years instead of filing 13Fs? The parent comment very clearly said “other perpetrators”. I agree: Such a small fine is basically encouragement for other groups to commit the same violations. When the downsides are so negligible small, there is basically no risk for duplicating the bad behavior. If you ge…
I understand. But if the offense is itself marginal, it doesn't make sense to inflict disproportionate punishment on one offender; the penalty still needs to bear some relationship to the offense! We don't, like, arrest Ferrari drivers for violating a no-turn-on-red sign so as to prevent other rich assholes from ignoring the sign. They get the same ticket everyone else does, and if they keep doing it, eventually we suspend their license.
Re: SEC charges the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
The separation of church and state is not about preventing any kind of relationship between religious institutions and the government. Rather, it is about ensuring that the government does not establish an official state religion, and that it remains neutral towards different religious beliefs and practices.
This - but one could argue that the state having to make determinations of what constitutes a religious belief and practice _could_ go against the separation of church and state.
yes
Re: SEC charges the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, either way, I'm looking for an intuition about how much an infraction like this should cost. Presumably, the settlement also includes the LDS church's consent to start filing reliable 13F's. I'm not saying I think 5MM is the right number; I'm just saying I have no intuition for what the number should be, and the rationale I see on the thread seems to be "they're big". If I get pulled over in a Bentley with an…
Not in Sweden tho, traffic tickets are proportional to income.
Many countries have it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-fine