IRS Wants To Tax Cash App Transfers But NOT Wall Street Transactions

The IRS has announced plans to crack down on average people using cash transfer apps to pay for services and send money to friends, saying that transactions of more than $600 at a time or over the course of a year could be subject to taxes in the future. Meanwhile, billions of dollars in Wall Street trades take place everyday, yet not one of those high-dollar transactions gets taxed. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins discusses this disturbing development and how it punishes working class people.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Recently with the release of the Pandora papers, we learned once again, how the wealthy elite, not just here in the United States, but around the globe are hiding money to avoid paying taxes. Couple of years ago, the Panama papers already told us something similar. And of course, we also had recent reports about billionaires and other members of the top 1% paying a lower effective tax rate than the average American working class citizen. So what is the IRS doing? Oh, they're cracking down except they're, they're not cracking down on the billionaires and the millionaires. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. They're cracking down on you and me. They're cracking down on average everyday people with a new rule that says, if you are using cash apps, Venmo, Zelle, PayPal, Cash app, any of those, and you're paying one single person more than $600 a year transferring them money, starting next year, we're going to tax you, actually tax the recipient.

So whether you use it to pay for babysitters, dog walkers, people shopping for your groceries, your barbers, which is hugely popular now. Yeah. They're going to tax the hell out of it because you know, we don't want these average everyday people to evade paying taxes. No, God, no. So it's easier for them to just tax those cash apps, to tax those money transfers, even if it's your grandmother sending you $500, you know, because maybe you're struggling a little bit, a fellow family member sending you a thousand dollars to help you get by. They're going to take taxes out of it. Meanwhile, the wealthy elite continue to hide money, the IRS knows it and they're doing nothing about it. Furthermore, you want to tax individual transactions. Okay. How about you start with Wall Street? How about we get that financial transaction tax that we have been trying to get passed for years now? Billions of dollars every day, dollars in quotation marks obviously, gets transferred on Wall Street. Trades here, trades there, trades every nanosecond of the day during the trading day. None of it taxed. Why is it more important to tax somebody sending a family member $700 than it is to tax the billions of dollars that come and go from Wall Street trades every single day? How does that make sense?

How is that okay? How is it okay to crack down on struggling American workers and let the wealthy elite continue to get away with it? We all know the answer to that because this is how the system is designed. Those at the top are the ones that the system protects. Those at the top are the ones that the system views as valuable. The rest of us, if we don't make that cut, we're expendable. We're the workers. We're the people who can get taxed to hell and back because, hey, we can't fight back. We can't go out and pay for lobbyists. We're not the ones cutting fat checks to politicians to keep those tax breaks coming. No. This story is truly one that gets under my skin. It leaves me at a loss for words, honestly, that's how off I am about this plan. Because if you want to start taxing individual financial transactions sending money from one group to another, then by God, you better start on Wall Street. Instead of trying to crack down on the people who, by the way, are already paying taxes when they use these apps as part of their personal income. They're already getting taxed. Those on Wall Street aren't.