The Biden administration wants Big Brother IRS to get even bigger
It seems to me that the Biden administration’s proposal to expand the spy powers of the feds and the IRS wouldn’t be popular even with most Democrats, if they knew about it:
The Biden proposal would drop the dollar threshold for transactions at which federal tax agents would be allowed to examine an individual’s private bank account from the present $10,000 to only $600.
Biden also wants to double the IRS workforce by adding 87,000 new government agents under the President’s “The American Families Plan Tax Compliance Agenda.”
Biden and Democratic allies in Congress claim the actions are needed to close the “tax gap,” the difference between what current federal law requires to be collected by the government and how much actually goes into the Treasury.
Boozman [R-Ark] said Biden’s unprecedented explosion of new federal spending is the major reason behind Biden’s push to double the size of the IRS and give it virtually unlimited power to monitor how much income Americans earn and where they spend it, said Boozman…
Boozman said the $10,000 threshold was approved decades ago to enable the IRS to assist federal law enforcement efforts against drug cartels, terrorist groups, and organized crime rings.
Boozman and some other Republican senators have introduced a bill to stop it, but I can’t imagine that the bill can pass the Senate these days. I assume it would require 60 votes, because the filibuster is still in place, so even if Manchin and Sinema wanted to join the Republicans, I don’t think that would be enough. And all the other Democrat senators – whether they bill themselves as leftists or not – seem to march in lockstep with the left on virtually every bill.
You can cynically say that you don’t think the Republicans really care, either, and that it’s all theater, yada yada yada. But I disagree. I think the Republicans realize exactly how this will be used: to go after the Democrats’ enemies (the right), plus the middle class kulaks.
At Instapundit it’s been pointed out that the WaPo and the NY Times, those stalwart newspapers of record, have been somewhat silent on the matter. No surprise there, because I think they know this would be unpopular with some Democrats, as well, who don’t mind screaming “tax the rich” but who themselves are not all that keen on being monitored and on the idea of so many more IRS agents.
If you have any reasonably moderate Democrat friends and family, you might run this one by them and ask if they’re in favor of the administration’s plans. I’d be curious to hear their responses.
The IRS did a fantastic job shutting down conservatives a decade ago, they are staffed with Leftists to do the bidding of Democrats and protect their friends.
Why wouldn’t they want more bureaucracy jobs for their backers?
Idiotic.
It will drive more people into crypto.
I’m confident both the Obamas and the Bidens have large crypto accounts.
“Not all people who own crypto are criminals, but all criminals own crypto.”
Cornhead,
Whether you own crypto or not, if these people need you to be a criminal, you will be.
My guess is that the $600 threshold would by default essentially encompass about 90% of all transactions that occur. Which at that point, it seems a little silly to bother with having any threshold at all. Why not just say we’re going to let the Feds look at any private account at any time they like without a warrant or any established pretense? What’s keeping them from doing that? Are they somehow concerned that it may not be popular? When has that stopped them from doing anything?
It is one think to want to hire 87,000 people, but, these days, it is quite another thing to do it.
Given the Biden Administration’s demonstrated level of incompetence, I will take the under.
Why should they care about the IRS, after all, they have just been running the printing press non stop.
It will be more than 90% of all accounts. All you need is one transaction over $600 and you are in. And if the same rules apply as they did for the $10,000 then any series of transactions somewhat under the limit will mean you are “structuring.”
Even some poor widow on Soc-Sec will have at least one over the limit when her Soc-Sec check gets deposited.
The FBI is going after private safety deposit boxes and confiscating the contents without any evidence they are illegal. The owners have to prove the legality of the contents to get them back. Anyone with a retirement account will be next. Leftists under Obama were advocating confiscation and placing everyone under Social Security. Except, of course, government employees.
This move ties in with the little-noticed push to do away with paper currency, converting to an all-digital system.
I pay my black Democrat housekeeper of 20 years, totally trustworthy, with cash. She pays no income tax, dislikes being paid by check because now there is a paper trail. She works hard and probably makes $50K or more, tax-free.
It’s the paper cash economy that results in under-reported incomes.
So in the $600 reporting future my check account statement will show checks made out to me (for cash dispersals, including my weekly church donation), to the taxing authorities, and to my credit cards, each in excess of $600, and that’s all.
I wonder if the IRS will get Congressional authority to sniff thru 99.99% of all credit card accounts on the basis of the $600 threshold.
Yeah, I doubt this has much to do with political prosecution. More likely, someone in the Biden administration realized just how desperate the feds are going to be for money in the very near future and that rich people will spend millions on attorneys to avoid paying 10s of millions in taxes.
An idea so politically toxic would normally get shot down early on in the policy-forming process but this is what happens when no one is actually in charge.
Mike
Then they will start taxing the transactions. Good Times, Good Times.
So, $10,000 thousand dollars differentiated between routine purchases and buying real estate or buying a car with cash.
$600 includes buying a new refrigerator… or a gun.
the difference between what current federal law requires to be collected by the government and how much actually goes into the Treasury.
Of course, they made the tax code so witlessly complex they generate a three-felonies-a-day problem and a potential for abuses constrained only by their own manpower.
All of the above criticisms are well founded.
Everything they do drives Americans toward either overwhelming rejection of them at the polls in 2022 and 2024 or “politics by ‘other’ means”. No way are hundreds of millions of Americans going to accept economic enslavement and disenfranchisement in “the land of the free and the home of the brave”.
Mere words? Idealized nonsense? Logically viewed, they’ve seized all of society’s levers, right?
The thing about logic, its great weakness is its inabiity to examine its originating premises. And when premises are flawed, the logic that extends from those flawed premises results in simply being wrong… with confidence.
Which is why they can’t see the coming consequences surrounding Afghanstan. Why they can’t see the border disaster’s impact upon ordinary Americans. Why they can’t see the rebellion that vaccine segregation is leading to and why IRS intrusion into bank accounts without evidence of wrongdoing shall have what for them are… unintended consequences.
I guess that would include everyone who received a pandemic relief check from the government.
Well this is very ‘Australian’. Every transaction of AUD1,000 or more must be reported by banks, payment processors, etc.
There’s an agency called AUSTRAC which is really an arm of the intelligence services which manages all this. Common knowledge that the real trigger for transaction reporting is somewhat lower than AUD1,000 because they have their own hooks into the transaction streams and do all kinds of data mining and pattern analysis.
See this in Hong Kong too… in the name of Anti Money Laundering compliance (US-derived: US will cut you off from corespondent banks and payment processors if don’t dance to FedGov Tune but no.. no American Empire throwing its weight around… no siree)… what happens is that Little People get dragged over the coals and prosecuted so that banks and institutions can report ‘Compliance Mandate Met’.. while the big boys get away with it. And of course has spawned another whole parasite industry of KYC (Know Your Client) verifiers for companies and institutions which need to shift money around inside and across jurisdictions. In my thing, we get a lot of this and it’s a massive constant headache.
Common enough in other first world jurisdictions too… I suspect USA is just a bit behind the rest because while most governments tend to be staffed with not exactly the best and brightest, FedGov is a particularly bad example.
Word to the wise: Beware of Value-added and Goods and Services type taxes. They have good points in that even a Bezos or a Gates cannot avoid paying them, but what they do (through mandatory vendor reporting of every transaction) is provide tax agency with modeling data for every type of business and profession — makes it far easier to data mine and subject you to various tortures if you’re any kind of outlier edge case.
Regardless, the Big Bad Guys will continue to be able to work the system and the wheels will continue to grind Little People.
Tyranny. Mostly invisible as long as one is a good little salary slave doggie. Dare to step off the reservation into entrepreneurship and it’s Game On.
I posted one of those letters from a bank on Facebook. I got one response:
“The American Families Plan has not even passed Congress. More than a little previous I’d say. Fearmongering against public education, healthcare and jobs because he doesn’t want to do the paperwork or pay his corporation’s rightful share of taxes – that’s just really sad.”
They just see it as “evil corporations” trying to get out of “paying their fair share of taxes.”