He said 10-50 gold per size. Just so you know.
Ah, that makes sense.
Either one of these would solve most if not all of the problems I see with taxing religions. My personal preference would be option a), but I think either would work just fine.
As I think about it, actually, option a of tax-free reserves still seems really bad, though. It still makes a huge handicap on building big temples, which are already comparatively rare, despite, in Terran's case, practically an entire realm with multiple cities chipping in to finance them. Taxes will make this even harder.
But taxes on transactions will effectively shut down much of the "banking," without restricting static holds on money.
It is difficult to know which transaction to tax, however, and how to adjust balances. If you tax inputs of gold, then the balance absolutely MUST be adjusted as well. That is, if I donate 500 gold, and 25 of it is taxed away, my balance should only raise 475 gold, or else, if I am the lord of that temple's region, I'll just get the 25 (or at least some of it) back, and can boost my balance again. It's marginal, but it'd happen. Heck, if I could have been doing that with Triunism, by now my balance would be a solid 500-700 gold more.
If you tax funds as they are withdrawn, it will not put any inhibition at all on accumulating funds for temple expansions, but will tend to "overstate" what we might call "banking reserves," that is, gold available for withdrawal and shift to another financial entity. This sounds like what Tom wants, so maybe is a good idea: there would be no penalty whatsoever under this system for any donation of gold to the temple, and gold stored in the temple would be tax exempt. However, any withdrawal from the temple would be taxed, thus if there was, say, a crusade, funding from the temple at the "destination" would need to be greater by the margin of the tax rate.
Actually, this would be awesome. Whatever the "final stop" on the crusade to pick up gold, the lord of THAT REGION would reap significant tax benefits as the crusaders withdrew gold. Using the SA example, if crusaders from Morek accumulated a surplus in SA, then traveled to, say, Eidulb, and withdrew gold there that had been accumulated by Astrumite believers, the Duke of Eidulb would end up receiving a profit as gold shifts from the outlands of Astrum to his personal tax share. If, however, Morekian priests, say, transferred all that crusader gold to Eidulb and deposited it, a portion would be taxed in Morek as it was withdrawn (increasing the overhead of the crusade), and a portion would be taxed in Eidulb as crusaders withdrew it, such that the transfer would move wealth from the general populace of Morek towards lords of central temples in Morek and the Duke of Eidulb.
That is, it would become financially advantageous for dukes to attract religious crusaders to their cities to attack neighbors. The cost for crusaders themselves would increase, thus limiting the possibilities of free banking. But the incentive to do it might become sufficiently concentrated in a few dukes that it could amount to several hundreds of gold.
Can you tell I do finance?