I was thinking about Debbie's claim of $1B held in reserve in IAS funds.
That much money would spin off $50M interest annually at a flat 5% without touching the principle, thus giving CoS a significant income stream forever -- or at least till some future century or year when inflation eroded the value.
In comparison to $50M annual interest, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) appears to run on an annual budget of around $199.8M (see
http://www.cpmissions.net/2003/pdf/10-11ProoposedBudgetAnnualpage60.pdf) -- or 0.004 of what CoS likely gets just from interest (setting aside other sources of income).
Scientology has maybe around 78K adherents in the US as of around 2004 -- but the SBC in the same year had around 16.4M adherents (
http://www.adherents.com/rel_USA.html#religions). That's around 210 Southern Baptists per Scientologist.
Now, the SBC says it gets about 16.46% of its budget from investments and interest (
http://www.namb.net/annualreport/). 16.46% of $199.8M = $32,887,080. That's about 2/3 the interest/investment income of CoS even though it has 210 times as many members. What's wrong with this picture? (Such a slush fund could sure by a lot of "noisy investigations" of people like, say, Debbie Cook.)
My own opinion? Sadness that the human race puts so much in resources into religion in general. What could we do with education in areas like science? What kind of space exploration could we do? What would colonies on the moon, Mars, and say Titan look like? Our concrete work too often involves ways to kill one another or kill other living things. Our abstract work too often involves a weird confusion between reality and our desired beliefs in invisible, unprovable things that may not exist. However we got it, we have been bequeathed the ability to reason, and yet we abandon it when someone says we must not be "reason"-able.