I don't usually like to get political, mainly because at the federal level, I distrust most all politicians on both sides of the aisles equally. I am not alone in this belief either. In the last fifty years, with the exception of a short period directly following the 9/11 attacks, the percentage of people that trusted the federal government in the US has been under 50%, usually way under. The current level is 22%.  

Why is this? Well, there are probably multiple reasons, one being that the country is so politically divided that the simple fact that usually about half of politicians fall on the other side of a persons political beliefs is enough that the whole system can't be trusted. My personal reasons for distrusting the federal government comes from the fact that congress has not done their job for most of my lifetime.  My starting point for this is that members of congress do not even read the bills they are voting on. The basic premise of the federal government used to be to look at a single issue, discuss and debate it and then vote on that issue. Now, we mainly see thousand page omnibus continuing resolutions where everyone gets what they want. No one bothers to read the bill, they just make sure that their pet project is included.

So, what has my rant got to do with crypto. On December 30th, the IRS will enact rules involving "brokers." I put brokers in quotations because it is really about crypto reporting. I will link an article from Bitcoin.com that details these changes, but, in short the IRS will consider anybody that supports trading crypto as brokers and therefore they will need to report all activity to the IRS.  I am not here to debate whether these rules are right or wrong, I am sure there are some articles on this, but, I am going to talk about why the way the changes are happening is why there is so little respect and trust for what happens in Washington.

First, no one at the IRS was elected to represent the people of the United States. Congress long ago made clear, though, that they don't want the responsibility of doing their job and have said unelected bureaucrats can handle most of what congress should be doing.  If congress wants to decide to classify crypto exchanges as brokers, then it should be put in a bill and go through steps to enact it as law. Seems tedious just to make a simple decision on tax law, right? Well that is exactly how the federal government is supposed to work. Slow, cumbersome and without much success at getting things done.

Second, the changes were dropped on Friday between two major holidays by people put in place by an administration that just got soundly defeated in a nationwide election. Did congress step up and say, "Maybe this is something we should take a look at?" Nope. I doubt we hear a word about it.  Individual congress members will be more than happy to tell anyone that has an issue with these changes that they had nothing to do with it and that it is a problem with IRS, not congress. 

Like I said, I don't care for either party, and we have seen both of them in charge in the last five decades enough to know that neither are going to make sweeping changes on their own.  My concern is that not enough people are concerned. The IRS, the agency put in charge of collecting your money for use by the federal government is the same organization that is now making major decisions on what money to collect, who should pay it, how to to collect it, and what the penalties for not paying are. And get this, there are over 2100 armed IRS agents.  Why does an accounting agency need weapons? My point, if Congress wants more of your money, they need to pass a law that says they can take it and this is how we are going to do it, and then we can decide whether to elect them again, not have the IRS sneak past a regulation when no one is looking.