Why The Biden Administration Wants To Track Your Bank Accounts
The idea that people — and governments — should mind their own business is older than the American republic. But Democrats aren't backing off.
By Kyle Sammin
October 22, 2021
It hardly strikes any of us as news that the government does not care about our privacy. But recent efforts by the Biden administration to put millions of Americans under the gaze of financial regulators take that disdain for ordinary citizens to a new level.
The Biden administration has proposed to require banks to provide the IRS with data on accounts with total yearly deposits or withdrawals of more than $600. That is to say: if more than six hundred bucks moves in or out of your account in a year in total, the IRS would know about it. This was too much even for Democrats, so now the proposed figure has been increased to $10,000.
When we talk about the right to privacy in America, it’s usually code for abortion. That makes little sense to anyone who hasn’t studied the twisted line of cases that activist judges used to cram infanticide into the Constitution. It also makes it hard to discuss without getting tangled up in culture war fights that really have nothing to do with the right in question.
Real privacy, though, the idea that Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren famously characterized in their 1890 article in the Harvard Law Review as a subset of “the right to be let alone,” is something Americans care as much about as any other people. The idea of anyone tracking our thoughts, our words, our finances, or our actions infringes on something that might not be spelled out in constitutional text but is nonetheless deeply felt by most people as a natural right.
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https://thefederalist.com/2021/10/22/why-the-biden-administration-wants-to-track-your-bank-accounts/
