You thought nonprofit organizations had to be charities, run by meagerly paid managers and volunteers?
Not anymore.
Thanks to the remarkable largess of Washington lawmakers, an ever-expanding definition of charity and a near-total collapse of government supervision, America's nonprofit economy has become a huge, virtually unregulated industry.
Within it, almost anything and anybody qualifies for tax-exempt status.
Auto racing promoters. Collection agencies. Country clubs. Criminals. A half-billion-dollar defense research corporation. Investment houses. Mail- order colleges. A polo museum. Retail stores. Professional surfers. An association of Druids. Foreign real estate investors. Space explorers. Even a chili appreciation society.
Each year for the last dozen years, an average of 29,000 new groups have been declared nonprofit and gone off the tax rolls. Today, an estimated 1.2 million organizations are exempt from taxes - not counting churches, which don't even have to apply.
Think of it as Congress' contribution to charity.
And you make up for the taxes they don't pay.
A major but little-noticed change has taken place in the American economy in the last 20 years: the dramatic growth of nonprofit businesses.
These businesses had an estimated $500 billion in revenues in 1990 - nearly six times the income of farms, five times that of utilities and twice as much as the construction industry.
They represented roughly 6 percent of the nation's total economic output and employed about 7 million people.
Since 1970, this tax-exempt sector has grown four times as fast as the rest of the economy.
In Philadelphia, nonprofits account for one of every six jobs among private employers. From the University of Pennsylvania, with 1991 revenues of $1.3 billion, to the Sonny Hill community basketball league, with revenues of $279,000, nonprofits affect the lives of Philadelphians in untold ways.
