Atheist Asks Vice President Biden about Tax-Exempt Housing Allowance for Clergy

TRANSCRIPT BELOW. Sorry the video cuts off at the end. I have the whole transcript here. If you are interested in the Secular Alliance at the University of Pittsburgh, please visit www.pghthink.com or email pitt.secular.alliance@gmail.com.

President of Secular Alliance: Hi, in the current tax code there exists an exemption for members of the clergy -- they don't have to pay taxes on housing allowances, and this exemption has been shown to be abused. In the current financial crisis, how can you justify forcing taxpayers to subsidize religious leaders?

Vice President Biden: Easily. In so far as there is abuse, if there is particular abuse, then they lose the exemption. But the notion that in the United States of America, under the Equal Protection clause, we are not able and it does not make no sense to see to it that whether they are Muslim clergy, or Jewish clergy, or Catholic clergy, or Protestant clergy, that they should not have the exemption. In the sense of the same thing as a charitable exemption, seems to us, seems to me, to make sense. You are right. You are right. There are clear cases of abuses that have existed. And there has been a reluctance where there have been shown to be clear cases of abuse, to in fact, to act. We should act when there is a clear case of abuse. Second point is, and this is not a justification of continuing the exemption, because I think the exemption exists on its merit, but the second point I was making is the total number of exemptions, my guess would be, of all the clergy in United States of America, based on their housing allowances, probably adds up to less than the top 1/10 of 1 percent making the tax breaks by a factor probably of five. So it is, doesn't mean it didn't make sense and shouldn't be dealt with, but A. in the last part of your question, when you talk about how can you justify this in times of economic difficulty, because in relative terms it's incredibly small relative to other exemptions. There's a lot of others I'd rather go for first, before I go for that one.

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