The Patriot Post® · Weaponizing the IRS to Invade Americans' Privacy
As more Americans have become aware of and begun ringing the alarm bells over the Biden administration’s plan to have the Internal Revenue Service effectively monitor every working American’s bank account, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was sent out to do damage control.
“It’s just a few pieces of information about individual bank accounts,” Yellen contended in a CNBC interview. “Nothing at the transaction level that would violate privacy.” Really?
According to the Biden administration’s plan, banks would be required to report to the IRS every individual account with more than $600 or transactions of more than $600. And the dubious justification for this massive intrusion on Americans’ privacy rights, according to Yellen’s Deputy Assistant Secretary Natasha Sarin, is to catch wealthy tax cheats: “[The IRS] … needs access to information about opaque income streams — like proprietorship and partnership income — that accrue disproportionately to high-earners.”
How does tracking virtually every working American’s bank account target wealthy tax cheats? Where is the evidence that the wealthy are engaged in such small-dollar workarounds? Would it not be more legitimate to go after, say, Joe and Jill Biden for schemes to avoid paying payroll taxes on $13 million in income?
The Biden administration’s leftist worldview is that the money Americans have labored to earn and collect is not really the property of those individual Americans, but instead ultimately belongs to the federal government. It’s the socialism in their blood that screams “injustice” whenever they see any disparity in income. Their “logic” boils down to this: The wealthy must be tax cheats, or how else could they be wealthy?
In a way, who can blame them for thinking this is widespread? Many of these very Democrat politicians have accumulated great wealth by working to rig the tax system in their favor. Now, Americans are supposed to believe that this latest Biden administration plan is aimed at targeting wealthy tax cheats? The truth is, its real target is the American working class.
This is why 41 industry groups have warned that Biden’s plan “is not remotely targeted” at major tax cheats, and it’s why 23 state treasurers recently signed a letter condemning it as “one of the largest infringements of data privacy in our nation’s history.”
Nebraska Treasurer John Murante contended: “This could lead to a tremendous invasion of privacy the likes of which our country has never seen. Millions of law-abiding Americans would suddenly have their bank accounts opened to federal investigators for no more reason than buying a refrigerator. This is simply unconscionable. To make matters worse, under this proposal, saving for college could put an American family on the IRS’s radar, costs that most likely will be passed on to the public.”
Biden is following Barack Obama’s modus operandi, which is to weaponize every federal government agency — and the IRS in particular — against the American people. Clearly this intrusive measure enables the IRS to go after lower-income individuals – service industry workers who are often paid in cash.
We noted previously how Biden’s DOJ is threatening to go after parents who object to schools indoctrinating their children in the radical leftist ideology. Here we have Biden seeking to expand the ability of the IRS to monitor every single American’s finances and spending as if we’re all a bunch of criminal tax cheats.
It sure seems like the Democrats’ objective is to radically transform America into a socialist authoritarian police state.