spy on your bank account
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has been exposing in the “The Leader’s Roundtable” that Democrats are attempting to negatively transform American life as we know it through their enormous and wasteful spending package.
Even Democrats know many of the proposals they are pushing are unpopular with the public, which is why they want to rush this through before the American people know what’s in it. This is especially true when it comes to their plan to double the IRS by hiring an additional 87,000 IRS bureaucrats to monitor the bank accounts of any American who spends more than $28 on average per day. As Representative Mike Kelly said in McCarthy’s latest Leader’s Roundtable, “Every single American will be affected by this.”
House Republicans won’t let Democrats “pass the bill to find out what’s in it” – and instead are revealing how this legislation will make life worse for American families.
President Joe Biden and Congressional Democrats want to double the size of the IRS and give them the power to monitor Americans who spend as little as $28 a day.
It’s an intrusive, abusive, and indefensible policy designed to track everything Americans do and place them under constant audit.
Joining Leader McCarthy were Representatives Drew Ferguson (GA-03), Andrew Clyde (GA-09), Tom Emmer (MN-06), Ashley Hinson (IA-01), and Mike Kelly (PA-16). They were joined by Eric Bruen, the President and CEO of Desert Valleys Federal Credit Union, and Warren Hudak, the President of Hudak and Company.
First: The IRS cannot be trusted with your information.
Rep. Ferguson: “This is about control. It’s about them looking into your bank accounts, looking at what you are doing and what you are spending money on. What happens if the party in power doesn’t like that you gave to a particular organization or that you purchase something like a firearm that goes against their ideology. This kind of surveillance is wrong.”
Rep. Emmer: “The IRS gets 1.4 billion cyberattacks per year. They’ve already been compromised. This is a terrible policy.”
Rep. Clyde: “I suffered incredible abuse from the [IRS] as a small business owner… the Internal Revenue Service, which was weaponized by the Obama Administration at the time, so just think about what an 80,000 additional agents would do… they accused me of depositing my legally earning money, which was fully reported, in the bank in the wrong denomination.”
Second: The IRS will spy on middle and working-class Americans, not just the rich.
Leader McCarthy: “One of the most egregious things Democrats are trying to do here is hire 87,000 new IRS agents, larger than the population of Scranton, PA, to spy on Americans’ bank accounts. If you make or spend $28/day, Democrats want the government to access your banking information. This is wrong.”
Rep. Hinson: “This is about unprecedented access for the IRS to get into people’s bank accounts at that granular level. And it’s about unprecedented power. Iowans are onto this. My office has fielded 2,000 phone calls on this issue specifically… The fear is palpable.”
Desert Valleys FCU President and CEO Eric Bruen: “Look at what it’s going to do in the long run. Individuals are already beginning to withdraw savings from our credit unions. We don’t want to go back to the cash under-the-mattress approach. We obviously would see liquidity issues and our ability to lend to the community… This is going to hit middle [class] American families the hardest, especially those two income families.”
Third: The Biden Administration is focused on the wrong things.
Hudak and Company President Warren Hudak: “Small businesses in Pennsylvania and throughout the country are struggling with labor shortages, rising inflation, and supply chain disruptions. Given these challenges, the Biden Administration’s proposals to require annual IRS reporting of inflows/outflows, from small businesses and individual accounts would just add insult to injury.”
Rep. Kelly: “This intrusion by the IRS is incredible. They’re sitting on 10.7 million tax returns from 2019 and 2020, and they’re focused on us not paying our fair share? Wake up.”
The Bottom Line: The IRS Surveillance Program crosses the line. This is a tax issue. It’s also a privacy issue. And it’s the wrong policy for the wrong time.
Democrats won’t give up. They want to pass their radical, big-government agenda before the American people have the chance to know what’s in it, including mass amnesty, higher gas prices, and higher heating costs.
But as Leader McCarthy and House Republicans showed, the American people have leaders who are willing to stand up for the truth.
