Biden’s Total Financial Surveillance

It’s starting to get serious!

We have strongly urged our friends and clients to have some assets off the grid.  See here and here.

It has always been the prudent thing to do.  But now it is becoming imperative!

Reason Magazine reports:

Imagine living in a world where every one of your non-cash financial transactions—a restaurant meal, a Venmo transfer to a friend, maybe some bitcoin bought on the dips—was automatically reported to a beefed-up, audit-hungry IRS.

That dystopia will become a reality if President Joe Biden gets his way. Biden, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, and key Capitol Hill allies such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) are pushing a vast, intrusive financial surveillance system in the name of closing the “tax gap.”

Here’s a snippet from A Treasury Department press release:  “The Administration’s proposals call for significantly increasing the IRS budget, specifically $80 billion of investment over the coming ten years in enforcement, IT, and taxpayer services generating an estimated $320 billion in additional tax collections over the next ten years.”

The Treasury is justly concerned that the plan, “The American Families Plan Tax Compliance Agenda,” will drive people to engage in more cash transactions.  That means that the government’s war on cash, already underway, will have to be shifted into overdrive.  As we wrote a year ago, “Cash is anonymous.  So, Washington doesn’t like it.  In fact, you may have noticed that Washington wants full access to everything you do, while it wants everything it does to be secret.”

Gold and silver are anonymous as well, which is intolerable to authoritarian governments.  We always recommend that people keep assets off the grid, especially in this age of rising crime, large-scale cyber hacking, and snooping big tech firms. 

More on the Biden plan from Reason:

The administration’s proposed “comprehensive financial account reporting regime” would dramatically increase the types of financial institutions and transactions exposed to the feds’ prying eyes. “All business and personal accounts from financial institutions, including bank, loan, and investment accounts,” would be forced to “report gross inflows and outflows” to the IRS. And not just bank accounts: The dragnet would now include PayPal, settlement companies, and “crypto-asset exchanges,” for starters.

The new domestic surveillance program, which requires congressional approval, is one prong of a tripartite strategy for transforming the entire global financial system into a harmonious, haven-free collection funnel to the IRS. The second part, which has taken up the bulk of Biden’s multilateral diplomacy thus far, is getting the industrialized world to agree on a global minimum corporate tax of 15 percent while setting up a system to prevent multinational companies from registering their profits in the lowest-tax jurisdictions.

Not only is Big Brother watching you, he is also getting bigger every day. It is only prudent to want to protect your privacy in this digital age.  Gold and silver are the single best means of getting your wealth off the grid and away from hackers, identity thieves, and other prying eyes.