Obama Administration Seeks to Expand Big Brother’s Monitoring of Private Citizens’ Financial Affairs

Despite the U.S. government’s recent posturing on the issue of foreign bank accounts and tax havens, more than a few retirees are asking a fundamental question: Where in the U.S. Constitution is the Federal government granted the power to know all about our financial affairs in a Big Brother-like fashion?

Like the Feds’ penchant for warrentless wiretaps, this recent attempt to expand surveillance of private citizens strikes many American citizens as patently illegal. At the very least, it may strike a backlash against the Obama Administration’s increasingly totalitarian expansion of government.

Many people maintain foreign bank accounts, not for tax evasion, but for convenience, safety and privacy: They simply don’t think it’s the U.S. government business (or anyone else’s!) to know what they do with their money. Once they’ve paid their income taxes, why should the U.S. government monitor where their money is?

As is well known, the doctrine of enumerated powers found in the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution clearly states that “[t]he powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Of course, the Feds have gradually ignored the Tenth Amendment through an ever-widening application of the Commerce Clause, the article of the Constitution that grants to the Federal government the right to regulate interstate commerce. Now we are at the point where the Feds believe they can demand that free citizens, living abroad, report every penny they have in every bank account, anywhere in the world, regardless of where that money was earned – or face criminal charges and years in prison. Thanks to the tax-happy Obama Administration and Sen. Carl Levin (D-Michigan) – desperate to raise trillions in new taxes to pay for socialist programs — the Feds are about to create a new slate of laws making the reporting requirements even more onerous than they already are.

But as it usually the case, the Feds’ new crusade against productive citizens will simply backfire. Banks are already reporting record numbers of people withdrawing cash to maintain in home safes. More and more people are choosing to avoid the government-controlled banking system altogether.