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Government Spending
Mr. TILLIS. Mr. President, American families are hurting, and there is no relief in sight. We are facing skyrocketing inflation, and families are feeling it every time they go to the grocery store.
We are facing a supply chain crisis that threatens to deny families the food and goods that they need. We are facing a surging energy crisis that is literally burning holes in the wallets of hard-working Americans.
Just this week, I drove up from Charlotte and I was amazed at how much more it took me to refuel my truck about halfway up from Charlotte to DC.
This has gotten so bad that some families are really beginning to rethink their travel plans as we approach the holidays. We are facing a labor shortage crisis, with small businesses and farms across the country struggling to fill jobs. Even as they raise the potential salaries, the people are simply not coming.
President Biden and his allies in Congress have chosen some interesting ways to respond to these crises. In some cases, they have just ignored them. They have been making excuses for others, and they have been making a case that everything will be fine if we just have more government, more spending, and more taxes.
That is why, for months, President Biden and congressional Democrats have put all their time and energy into crafting a completely partisan
$3.5 trillion tax-and-spending spree. They are spending on leftwing priorities that will result in more debt, more inflation, more dependency government, and more government intrusion into the lives of all Americans.
Equally concerning is how the Democrats want to pay for some of their out-of-control spending. They plan to take $400 billion from taxpayers by monitoring and auditing their bank accounts.
Democrats want to turn your bank or your credit union--that small bank around the corner in some rural community across America--into a branch of the IRS, making them monitor and report your financial activity and directly report to it the IRS.
To make matters worse, the Democrats want to hire 80,000 new IRS agents so they can go through your personal financial information--what you spend your money on and what income you take in. And using that information, the IRS will then try to squeeze out any additional money that they can from you.
The Democrats originally proposed making the threshold of the IRS reporting at a $600 transaction. Americans who heard about the scheme were outraged.
Most Americans aren't too fond of the IRS. I dare say, if you were to do a poll of the 10 most favorite government agencies, the IRS wouldn't make the list. And they certainly don't trust the IRS with having more power and more of your personal financial information.
My office alone has received over 15,000 emails opposing this overreach. I imagine many of my Democratic colleagues have heard from their constituents as well, so it is not surprising they went back to the drawing board. Since the $600 transaction wasn't selling, they came up with a new proposal, and it was a total of $10,000 in transactions that would trigger an IRS reporting requirement.
But you can't be fooled by this sleight of hand. It will subject nearly every American with a job to the same IRS scheme. Consider that the average American makes a little bit more than $60,000 in annual expenditures, yet Democrats have the audacity to claim that this plan is really just targeted to the wealthy.
I don't know many hairdressers and plumbers and painters or Uber drivers who are billionaires, but I do know that they make over $10,000 a year and they will be subject to the same scheme because of the way they make their income.
Now, these hard-working Americans, who have done nothing wrong, could have their personal information sent directly to the IRS.
And let's be clear, this additional information won't even provide the IRS with direct evidence of tax noncompliance. Instead, it would give the IRS--and keep in mind, 80,000 more IRS employees; roughly twice, doubling the number of people working in the IRS--to go on a taxpayer-funded fishing investigation designed to rummage through individual Americans' finances in the hope of finding noncompliance.
We don't let police enter someone's house without a warrant in the hopes they can find something illegal, and we certainly should not provide this kind of power to the IRS.
And what will happen when a hard-working hairdresser or plumber or carpenter, who is already struggling to make ends meet, gets a letter from the IRS alleging that they owe more taxes?
They don't have an army of tax lawyers and accountants like billionaires do. They will have to try and take on the IRS themselves, and that is a losing proposition.
The IRS reporting plan is not about catching tax cheats and making sure billionaires are paying their taxes. It is about shaking down middle-class Americans to pay for the Democrats' tax-and-spending spree, plain and simple, burning them with more bureaucracy and giving them yet another thing they have to worry about, in addition to rising inflation, energy prices, and supply chain shortages.
I was talking with one of my staff this week about my own personal situation and what I think happens every day in this country. You have somebody who is struggling to pay their bills. I had a family member many years ago who came to me and said they needed--if I would give them a loan so that they could make ends meet. They worked in construction and they had a project coming due, but they had a cash-
flow problem. So I made them a loan, like so many people do for their friends and family members. Well, depending upon the size of that gesture, it could suddenly be a reportable transaction to the IRS.
What is an IRS compliance agent going to do?
They are going to call you up and say: Well, you didn't report that as income.
And then the person is going to say: Well, it was a loan.
And then the IRS agent is going to say: Well, where was the document?
And so: It was with a brother or an uncle or a cousin. We shook hands, and I promised to pay him back.
Those are the kinds of things that are going to happen if this IRS tax transaction reporting goes into place. That is why I recently joined with Senator Tim Scott and dozens of my Republican colleagues to introduce legislation that will prevent the Biden administration and the IRS from implementing their surveillance plan. It is wrong. It is an overreach, and it is not going to work.
But the easiest solution is for my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to simply drop this misguided IRS reporting scheme.
Tax-and-spend policies have already made life harder for middle-class Americans. Americans are struggling from the impact of COVID, from the impact of inflation, from energy shortages, and so many uncertainties that we have experienced over the past couple of years. The last thing they need is to have the IRS, with an army of tens of thousands IRS agents, prying into their bank accounts and causing more confusion, more frustration, and more heartache at the worst possible time.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Washington.
SOURCE: Congressional Record Vol. 167, No. 190
The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
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