Maria Bartiromo, GOP Senator Trash ‘Whacky’ Biden Plan to Monitor Bank Transactions Above $600

Senator Steve Daines (R-MT) joined Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo on Thursday in trashing President Joe Biden’s demand for banks to begin reporting financial transactions above $600 to the federal government.

“Because you’re on the Banking Committee, you’ve got to give us your take on this whacky idea from Joe Biden that he wants banks to report all transactions, flow-in and flow-out, from our bank accounts, because he thinks he’s going to catch tax cheats from someone withdrawing $600 from their bank account,” Bartiromo said in a morning interview with Daines.

Daines concurred. “That should be chilling for every American who hears that new,” he said. “To think that big brother, the federal government, wants to know about every transaction, $600 or more — it’s frightening. … This is big, big government here coming to a theater near you.”

Democrats drafted the proposal to require banks to report financial transactions to the IRS as a way to fund their $3.5 trillion spending plan, claiming it would raise as much as $500 billion. Lawmakers are considering whether to change the provision to instead require that banks report on customers who make more than $10,000 in transactions annually after the original proposal met with widespread backlash, including from the American Bankers’ Association, which condemned the plan as a “a dragnet of data collection for almost everyone with a financial account.”

“The biggest cost to banks, however, would be the damage done to the bank-customer relationship,” the ABA added in a statement. “Banks are trusted to safeguard customers’ money and information, and they take that responsibility seriously. This proposal threatens that trust by forcing banks to share account information with the IRS, which has repeatedly failed to protect the personal information of individual taxpayers in recent years.”

Watch above via Fox Business Network.