Obamacare surprise of the day - billions of 1099s

As the Wicked Witch of the West said, we had to pass the bill to read the bill.

At HotAir:

"Under current law, businesses are required to issue 1099s in a limited set of situations, such as when paying outside consultants. The health care bill includes a vast expansion in this information reporting requirement in an attempt to raise revenue for an increasingly rapacious Congress."

And: "That means any time a business pays any one entity $600 or more in a year, they will have to create a 1099 to file with the IRS. That means that the businesses have to get all of the tax information for every vendor, provide separate accounting for every payee, and then send the forms to both the IRS and the payees at the end of every year — as the payees do the same with their vendors, and so on. Edwards puts the scope in context:

For the $14 trillion U.S. economy, that’s a hell of a lot of 1099s. When a business buys a $1,000 used car, it will have to gather information on the seller and mail 1099s to the seller and the IRS. When a small shop owner pays her rent, she will have to send a 1099 to the landlord and IRS. Recipients of the vast flood of these forms will have to match them with existing accounting records. There will be huge numbers of errors and mismatches, which will probably generate many costly battles with the IRS. …

Private transactions are the core of a market economy, and the source of America’s growth and prosperity. Now the federal government is imposing a vast new web of red tape on perhaps billions of these growth-generating private exchanges."