[nightowl_games]

I think the American elite, and the Republican party are trying to frame this issue as if it is about regular Americans. Even the title of this link does that. I imagine the IRS would use this to pursue the wealthy who regularly use tax loop holes. I've heard that the IRS is massively defunded and toothless. We all know the American elite pay very little taxes and we all know the WSJ carries water for the American elite.

Disclaimer: I'm not American.

[marcinjachymiak]

The trigger for surveillance is $600 which is practically every American. It is certainly about regular people.

Larger sums of many are already tracked, so wealthy people would have already been monitored.

[ultrarunner]

The current limit is $10,000 (but practically less in an attempt to nail those who engage in "structuring" transactions to avoid the $10k limit). That's a car or any other number of things in reach of normal not-considered-wealthy people. [0] is interesting reading, but honestly just searching for "structuring" leads to several cases like [1] where the government seized $107,000 from a convenience store owner due to the deposits from that business being under the reporting threshold.

I don't know how you get under a $600 threshold, but exposing orders of magnitude more people to this policy is likely to do far more damage than to result in any good. This is already not just about wealthy people.

[0] https://www.overlawyered.com/2012/04/structuring-who-can-get...

[1] https://reason.com/2015/05/01/irs-steals-107000-from-conveni...

[salawat]

This is much more aimed at the "little guy". There's apparently any number of things you can end up doing for someone that'd qualify as a taxable event. Getting financial institutions to report movements over $600 is getting into "Eh, gave my buddy 600 for <one-off thing>, now he owes me a favor or whatever". Which is way more intrusive than it's ever been in my lifetime.

[jjeaff]

Actually, due to lack of funding, the IRS has found that it is easier to go after middle and upper middle income earners rather than the wealthy. The wealthy have attorneys and the means to fight audits and make things difficult. You can just strong arm a middle class citizen and they will just pay up out of fear.

[cheschire]

One could imagine this could even be used by the elite to ensure nobody else can become elite. Anonymous tips, some comments made during an audit, and the multimillionaires suddenly struggle to make that third comma.