Render unto Caesar

In this week's Camino a Ítaca a look at an endemic wrong. An ongoing robbery from the people that now looks like it's only going to get worse. Click over to read the original article in Spanish published in the HOY or read the English translation below. (PDF en castellano abajo)

I’ve always had an inherent respect for the taxman. Irrespective of the country that I was living in, from my native Canada to the United States to semi-lawless countries like Azerbaijan, Libya and Yemen, I’ve always had a keen awareness of their presence.

After all it was Eliot Ness and not the police that took down someone like Al Capone. He went to jail for tax evasion and not for murder. In the end it probably won’t be his inciting insurrection and crimes against democracy that imprisons Donald Trump, but he just might don an orange jumpsuit to match his hair and makeup for cheating on his taxes.

Each country has its own quirks when it comes to tax time and imagine my surprise the first time I filed my taxes here in Spain. The complex language itself was complicated enough to wade through, but then I got to a series of boxes that I simply did not understand. It was something I had not seen before in other countries.

There on the form were two boxes to tick, 105 and 106. They confused me. One was for if I wanted to give 0.7 percent of my taxes to what is in effect a foreign power and the other was to give the same to unspecified NGOs. That or a combination of both, in which each get 0.7%. And if you marked neither, that money would then return to the state’s coffers.

The stark choice made it suspiciously seem like the Catholic Church was the state sponsored religion when it is in fact just another belief amid the myriad of creeds and faiths out there. Evangelists, Orthodox, Protestants, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Zoroastrians, Bahai’s, Gnostics, Jupiter and the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster members it seemed need not apply.

But this anomaly looks like it might soon change with the recently created Direccion General de Libertad Religiosa, upgrading its former status from subdirectorate to directorate. Apparently one of its main aims will be the fiscal equalization of all religions. All religions recognized by the state that is. It seems that not all imaginary beings are considered equal in the eyes of the law.

With this move, rather than closing these yawning tax loopholes, more creeds would be able to take advantage of the ludicrous tax exemptions that the Catholic Church now enjoys. Exemptions which allow it to not only be exempt from paying taxes on its buildings where worship takes place, but more pertinently on the enormous sums it makes from the rental of its vast holdings of real estate.

The Government seems to have confused strengthening the necessary secularism of a modern, democratic State with a move towards a fuzzy, gutmensch multi-confessionalism. Instead of suppressing the unbridled prerogatives of the Catholic Church, especially the IBI, and the reversion of more than 100,000 properties unlawfully immatriculated by the Catholic Church since 1948, it is going to increase the privileges of other religious confessions of "well-known roots".

As Mark Twain once wrote, “(Where) No church property is taxed, and so the infidel and the atheist and the man without religion are taxed to make up the deficit in the public income thus caused."