Heres an economic perspective on your tithe (tiende) that is - TopicsExpress

Heres an economic perspective on your tithe (tiende) that is actually not your tithe, but LESS. Suppose you earn 5,000 euro gross (bruto) per month. Being a faithful christian, you would be inclined to donate (at least) the first 500 of it to God, right? Thing is, in the time of the Bible, the government did not make donations to the Holy Temple tax deductible, and so, (the first) 500 sacks of grain of the 5000 total indeed equaled your tithe back then. Nowadays, however, if you give 500 of your 5,000 euro income to God, you would not be giving 10%, but only 4.8%! To see why, notice that if you give 500 per month, the Belastingdienst would substract 52% (tax rate for the month income of 5000 euro) of it from your taxable income. Giving 500 thus means that in reality, you yourself pay only 48% x 500 = 240 euro, the rest of the bill is up to the government to pay. How to donate 10% or any other desired percentage? I calculated an easy formula to determine this (n.b. this formula assumes that tax is UNLIMITEDLY DEDUCTIBLE AT ALWAYS THE SAME PERCENTAGE. A christian government tax worker is challenged to cure this simplification). If Y is your gross income, T is the tax rate from your Belastingschijf and P is the percentage of income you want to donate (10% for instance), the amount you need to donate A is equal to PY/(1-T). So, for our 5000 euro earner who wants to give his tithe, A=(10% x 5000)/(1-0.52) = 1041,67 euro. Notice that this is more than DOUBLE the 500 euro discussed before! To see why this is no error: You pay 1041,67 to Project X, the government refunds you 52% x 1041,67 = 541,67 euro. Total real donation 1041,76-541,67 = 500 euro! In percentage terms: 500/5000 = 10%. In sum: You pay 500, the Project gets 1041,67 euro! (and government debt goes up by 541,67 euro, but hey)