Do Churches Create a Taxpayer Burden?

I saw a claim the other day that churches cost the government $83.5 billion in lost taxpayer revenue.  A related claim I saw was that if churches paid taxes, then we would only have to pay 3% in taxes.  But is that true?  Let's take a closer look.

Thomas Stuart Ferguson found nearly every Book of Mormon claim wrong?

On Saturday, a post on reddit made the top page that challenged the Latter-day Saint narrative.  This isn't unexpected, it happens from time to time.  The unusual part was how popular it got.  The article from an evangelical counter-cult site was posted to todayilearned and received 83k upvotes, 3 platinum, 10 gold, and 14 silver before being removed by the moderators.  (They didn't say why, probably either for 1. unreliable source, or more likely, 4. No politics/agenda pushing which is usually what is cited when they remove a religious post.)

The title of the post was "TIL A devout Mormon set out in 1955 on an archaeological expedition to prove the Book of Mormon's claims. After 15 years instead he found nearly every claim in the BOM was wrong and the papyrus J. Smith claimed written by Abraham was actually just a page ripped out of the Egyptian Book of the Dead"

A few of the comments wondered how we react to this sort of stuff.  The post was cross-posted to the latterdaysaint subreddit with the same question for us, and it received many positive responses before it was taken down. (I presume because the post it was pointing at was taken down.)

Here is my response to the claims made in the title and the article.