The Heritage Foundation reports that Joe Biden and congressional Democrats are trying to force financial institutions to report their customers’ account balances to the IRS. The language is hidden in the $3.5 trillion spending bill that Democrats in Congress hope to eventually push through with the help of a handful of RINOs (Republicans-in-Name-Only).
Consumers and financial institutions are naturally outraged by the introduction of this new political weapon. Yet House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal (D-Mass.) still considers it a financial issue. He believes he can fix the legislation by raising the amount banks have to report from a $600 threshold to a $10,000 threshold.
But the threshold isn’t the problem. The first problem is that the legislation would treat the American public as “subjects” of the government, rather than have the government be the servants of the people. The government doesn’t need to know how much we have in the bank. It only needs to know how much we earn – and that is just for the sake of income taxes, which is problematic in itself. Whether we spend our money or are frugal with it is our business, not the government’s.
Secondly, the information is supposed to be reported to the IRS. The IRS is not a secure organization. In 2014-2015 nearly 700,000 U.S. taxpayers’ account information was leaked to an “investigative” website.
Third, the IRS is notoriously a political weapon through which Democratic administrations, in particular, have attacked their political opponents’ finances. During the Obama years, conservative groups had their 501C(3) [Not for Profit Organization] applications deliberately delayed or lost while liberal groups’ applications sailed through the bureaucracy. If the IRS gets information about every American’s finances, the government will have the ability to selectively impoverish any individual, business, organization, or group.
Fourth, Democrats say that they are attempting to cut down on tax evasion in order to pay for the spending bill, but their math, as usual, greatly exaggerates the amount of money they would bring in.
Fifth, the cost of complying with the regulations will be staggering, especially for smaller financial institutions. Not only will families and businesses lose their financial privacy, they will also face higher account fees, lower interest rates on their accounts, and fewer free services. It won’t be only the rich who end up paying for this. It will be everyone who uses a bank. And if enough people pull their money out of banks, it will cripple the American financial industry making it harder for businesses to acquire capital for improvements and expansion. This is proposed legislation is definitely an economy killer.
If Congress wants to truly resolve America’s financial crisis, they should quit spending so much money. Over half of the money in the spending bill is going to political payoffs, not to the actual needs of the country. The federal government’s massive and growing debt is squashing the economy. For example, the U.S. Department of Agriculture proudly reports that they are providing Food Stamps to 46 million people. If we had the economy we had three years ago, they could cut that number in half, and the government wouldn’t be paying for people to eat. People would be earning their own food. That alone would save a fortune, not to mention the revenue increase from the productivity of 23 million workers.
Thomas Sowell, the black, American political philosopher, has said, “The Welfare State is the oldest con game in the world. First you take people’s money away quietly and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly.” Imagine a pickpocket lifting your wallet and then generously gifting you with half of the money that was in it. That is the federal government under Joe Biden.
Our problem is that the government wants us to believe that the government is the only entity that can solve our problems – and that is a lie. This country was founded by and became great on the backs of people who trusted God, who solved their own problems, who built their own businesses, who fought their own fights. America was a great nation, the greatest in history, less than 50 years ago. But now that the government and the mainstream media and the National Education Association have trained us to let someone else solve our problems and provide for our needs, we are becoming a mere shell of who we once were. And the world is much worse off for the loss.
