Democrat Empathy Does Not Extend to the Working Class Anymore

The IRS will start making cash app services file 1099K forms with the government for users who transact more than $600.00 a year. This is a back door around the Democrats’ effort last year through Congress to get banks to report people’s account balances.

When Republicans expressed outrage about this turn of events yesterday, Democrats and their friends in the press immediately accused the GOP of supporting tax cheats. These people have clearly never lived a working-class or entrepreneurial life.

It has nothing to do with supporting people not paying their taxes and everything with realizing the burden now imposed on them.

If you get more than $600 on Venmo, you now have to make sure you document which were payments among friends and which were business payments. Venmo won’t know, so it will tell the government you made $600. Good luck with the 87,000 new IRS agents when they come to audit you.

If you bought something for $1000 a few years ago and sell it on eBay next week for $800, eBay is going to file a 1099 showing you got $800 in income. If you didn’t keep your receipt from five years ago, good luck convincing the IRS that you lost $200 in the transaction.

If you have season tickets to a sporting event and resell a number of them on Stubhub, when you cross $600, they will file a 1099. You better keep up with everything or else.

And therein lies the rub.

The person on Ebay would have never had to go through the hassle of documentation in the past. Now she will. And the odds are she will have to pay taxes because she cannot afford the accountant to get things right and does not know the Cohen rule herself.

This is about the regulatory and compliance burden. It is not about tax cheats. It is why the IRS used to have much higher limits so the poor and middle class did not have compliance costs.

Democrats used to have great empathy for the middle class. Now, they just assume the working 70-year-old housekeeper who takes payments on Venmo and barely makes ends meet is going to hire an accountant and cut into her already sparse income. They presume the 40-year-old mom who drives part-time for Uber and sells stuff on eBay is going to know the rules and the forms or pay someone to help her out.

The Democrats used to understand this was not about propping up tax cheats. It was about not making the poor, the middle class, and the new entrepreneur have to cover the compliance fees that the rich and established can. Now, they just presume these people are lying and should be fined

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