{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.thune.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=C1F81891-3163-4DE5-AD11-2FC893DCA83C", "Thune: Democrats Propose an Unprecedented IRS Shakedown of Americans\u2019 Financial Transactions", "2021-10-19", "2021", "2021-10", "Republican", "Senate", "SD", "John Thune", "T000250", "www.thune.senate.gov", "thune", "https://www.thune.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases", "scraper", "U.S. Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) today reiterated his strong opposition to Democrats\u2019 proposal to double the size of the IRS and monitor everyday Americans\u2019 bank accounts in order to help fund the Democrats\u2019 reckless tax-and-spending spree. In September, Thune led a letter to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) urging him to abandon the Biden administration\u2019s unprecedented proposal to expand the reporting of the private, confidential financial data of law-abiding Americans from financial institutions to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Thune\u2019s letter was signed by every Republican member of the Senate Committee on Finance and the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs.\n\nThune\u2019s remarks below:\n\n\u201cAs you know, we've been saying for some time now, we have been criticizing and pointing out what a terrible idea the Democrats\u2019 tax-and-spending spree is for the country and what a horrible vision that is for the future of America.\n\n\u201cAnd today, we want to focus on one particular element of that, and that is how it's paid for. And in particular, this proposal, which would double the size of the IRS, literally double the size of the IRS, and allow them to snoop into every American's transactions, bank transactions.\n\n\u201cAnd as has already been pointed out, this is something that is so sweeping, we've never seen anything like it before, where you're literally talking about an IRS dragnet across the bank accounts of every single American, or at least every single American who banks. Because as has been pointed out, any American who uses a bank account probably at some point is going to \u2013 with deposits and withdrawals \u2013 exceed $600.\n\n\u201cEven if it's $10,000, it's still going to capture thousands, millions of Americans with this.\n\n\u201cAnd so this is one of many really bad ideas in the Democrat proposal. But this one in particular needs to be killed for all the reasons that have been mentioned, and not the least of which is the huge invasion into Americans\u2019 privacy.\n\n\u201cAnd something that, as Senator Moran pointed out, I've heard from, you know, lots of South Dakotans, thousands of South Dakotans, already about this particular proposal.\n\n\u201cBut secondly, because it will double the size of the IRS, an agency which had been pointed out, has had problems keeping information secret.\n\n\u201cHuge leaks of massive amounts and volumes of individual private taxpayer information. And so it's got that component, you know, historic in terms of its sweep and invasion of, you know, people's privacy in this country, the shakedown that it would represent of American taxpayers.\n\n\u201cAnd finally, if successful, who ends up paying for it? Well, the Joint Committee on Taxation, which does a distributional analysis of all these proposals, has said in their analysis that about 75 percent of the revenue raised under this proposal would be generated by people making less than $100,000 a year. Only five to 10 percent of that revenue would be paid by those making more than $500,000 a year.\n\n\u201cSo in other words, the Democrats\u2019 suggestion that this proposal and the tax increases included in their plan won't hit lower income Americans, it's just false.\n\n\u201cI mean, this is a this is a proposal that will shake down average Americans in a way that they\u2019ve never been shaken down before, and the burden of compliance with this is going to be borne by people in lower income categories.\n\n\u201cThe tax revenues raised, and the Democrats are assuming literally hundreds of billions of dollars in tax revenue as a result of this, the majority of that up to 75 percent, borne by those making less than $100,000 a year.", 1, "2026-03-30T01:40:41Z", "2026-04-06T20:24:51Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://www.thune.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=C1F81891-3163-4DE5-AD11-2FC893DCA83C"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 0.8088888134807348, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}