Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) sharply criticized a proposal to force banks to report more account information to the IRS, making it much more likely that Democrats will have to drop a plan that could raise hundreds of billions of dollars for their social spending bill.
Manchin said in an interview with the Economic Club of Washington, D.C., that he had already told President Joe Biden that he was against that idea.
“Do you understand how messed up that is?” Manchin said he told the president. “This cannot happen. It’s screwed up.”
“I think that one’s going to be gone,” Manchin added.
The potential fallout: Democrats have been on the defensive over that proposal for weeks now, with both the banking industry and Republicans calling it an unfair intrusion into people’s everyday finances.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and key Democratic lawmakers have stressed that the proposal would only give the IRS the total amount of money going in and out of an account in a given year — not a peek at individual transactions.
Democrats also lifted the threshold for the amount of withdrawals and deposits needed to trigger the reporting, from $600 to $10,000, in a sign that rank-and-file members had some doubts about the idea.
If the reporting requirements are out, it will make it that much harder for Democrats to raise the kind of revenue offsets they need for a big social spending package — even as the price tag for that measure has come down considerably.