WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) spoke on the Senate floor in opposition of the Democrats tax and spending spree and their plan to bulk up the IRS in order to track American’s personal bank accounts.
Watch the full floor speech here.
Transcript:
American families are hurting, and there is no relief in sight.
We’re facing skyrocketing inflation and families are feeling it every time they go to the grocery store.
We’re facing a supply chain crisis that threatens to deny families the foods and goods they need and depend on.
We’re facing surging energy prices that are burning holes in the wallets of hardworking Americans. Just this week I drove up from Charlotte and I was amazed at how much more it took me to refill my truck halfway up from Charlotte to DC.
This has gotten so bad that some families are rethinking their travel plans as we approach the holidays.
We’re facing a labor shortage crisis, with small businesses and farms across the country struggling to fill jobs, even as they try to raise salaries. The people are simply not coming.
President Biden and his allies in Congress have chosen some interesting ways to respond to these crises.
They’ve been ignoring some. They’ve been making excuses for others. And they’ve been making the case that everything will be fine if we just have more government, more spending, and more taxes.
That is why, for the last several months, President Biden and Congressional Democrats have put all their time and energy into crafting a completely partisan tax and spending spree.
Their spending on left-wing priorities will result in more debt, more inflation, more dependency on government. And more government intrusion into your life.
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 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 directly to the IRS.
To make matters worse, Democrats want to hire 80,000 new IRS agents so they can go through all your personal financial information – what you spend your money on, and what income you take in. Using that information, the IRS will then try to squeeze out any additional money they can from you.
Democrats originally proposed making the threshold of IRS reporting just a single $600 transaction.
Americans who heard about the scheme were justifiably outraged.
Most Americans already aren’t too fond of the IRS. I dare say that if you did a poll on the ten 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 more than 15,000 emails opposing it. I imagine my Democratic colleagues heard from their constituents as well.
So it’s not surprising that they went back to the drawing board. Since the $600 transaction wasn’t selling, they came up with a new proposal.
And what they are now proposing is that a total of $10,000 in all transactions will trigger the IRS reporting requirement.
But don’t be fooled by this rebranding effort. It will still subject nearly every single American with a job to this IRS scheme. Consider that the average American has more than $60,000 in annual expenditures.
Yet, Democrats have the audacity to claim this plan is really just targeted towards the wealthy.
I don’t know many hairdressers, plumbers, 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 this scheme because of the way they make their income.
Now these hardworking 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, doubling the people working at the IRS - a jumping-off point to begin a taxpayer-funded fishing investigation designed to rummage through individual Americans’ finances in hopes of finding noncompliance.
We don’t let the police enter someone’s house without a warrant in hopes they can find something illegal. And we certainly should not provide this kind of power to the IRS.
And what will happen when that hardworking hairdresser or plumber—who is already struggling to make ends meet—gets a letter from the IRS alleging they owe more in taxes?
They don’t have an army of tax lawyers and accountants like billionaires do. They’ll have to try to take on the IRS themselves.
This IRS reporting plan is not about catching tax cheats and making sure billionaires are paying their taxes. It’s about shaking down middle-class Americans to pay for the Democrats’ tax and spending spree.
Burning them with more bureaucracy, and giving them yet another thing they need to worry about, in addition to rising inflation, energy prices, and supply chain shortages.
Mr. President, I was talking with my staff this week about my own personal situation, and what I think happens every day in this country.
You have someone struggling to pay their bills - I had a family member many years ago who came to me and asked if I would give them a loan so they could make ends meet. They worked in construction, 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. Depending upon the size of that gesture, it could suddenly be a reportable transaction to the IRS. What’s an IRS compliance agent going to do? They’re going to call you up and say, ‘ well, you didn’t report that as income.’ And the person is going to say, ‘well, it was a loan.’ And then the IRS is going to say, ‘well, where is the document?’ ‘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 reporting goes into place.
That’s why I recently joined 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’s wrong, it’s an overreach, and it’s not going to work.
Of course, the easiest solution is for the Democrats to drop this terribly 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. There are so many uncertainties we have faced over the last couple of years. The last thing they need is to have the IRS, with an army of tens of thousands of IRS agents, prying into their bank accounts and causing more confusion and heartache at the worst possible time.
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