In any case, it sounds extra-ordinarily stupid to travel anywhere with $82k in a tupperware container. Regardless of how the TSA/DEA case goes, I'm just in awe that people in this day and age legitimately choose to bring around all their money they worked decades to acquire in one easy to access place... like a container. (Assuming the prerequisites of opening a bank account were not the issue).
Seriously, what are they actually thinking? Are they fearful of banks? Is it out of frugality? Even in a 1% interest account, $82k would make a good amount of interest to use for spending.
Hell, imagine if the wrong person happened to get a peek at stacks of cash in someone's backpack? People could get killed in an instant over that.
Far more tragic is the victim blaming mentality that eschews and condones such behavior because, Well it's 2020 and no one should should be using cash let alone said cash in a container and travel with it. Get a bank account or better yet, just use credit like the rest of us...
> How does that make it OK for the feds to steal the money? It’s kind of dumb to walk around with a $1000 phone and a $4000 laptop as well.
It doesn't, and this LEO apologist narrative around here is what keeps things like this in place. This belief that such actions are the result of the victim's stupidity, and not the legal practices and judicial system that enable and ultimately legalize what amounts to theft is the source of the problem.
I feel bad for the elderly man, he came from a period where inherit Trust in law enforcement was basically the norm, perhaps ignorant and naive, but it can't help but underscore the times we live in.
For those who have never had anything taken away from them from Police its hard to explain the vulnerability and exposed sense of betrayal it leaves you with, especially when you're proven innocent. It makes you take so many precautions before leaving your home, not against the most cunning and slick of thieves, but those legally sanctioned to do so.
it’s always harder to change the status quo when the average citizen doesn’t know about the practice and isn’t directly hurt by it (concentrated costs, diverse benefits).
Also, I think the police in the USA right now are FAR more professional than they were when this guy was born. They literally didn’t use fingerprints or most kinds of forensic evidence. It was largely about picking up the person that most tweaked your spidey-sense and trying to work backwards from there. Today we have FAR more traceability of chain of evidence and documentation of actions by individual officers than ever before. I’m not apologizing for officers or bad policy, I just want to give credit where I think not enough is given.
A lot of forensic science is borderline or outright pseudoscience. Genetic testing with a FP rate worse than photo comparisons... Whats the ROC of the fingerprint comparison? Oops 'experts' working on comparing fingerprints haven't ever heard of a ROC.
The reason much of it works at all is because it gets applied primarily where there is a lot of other extremely traditional evidence (witnesses, motive, etc.).
Overconfidence in science-theater investigations have been resulting in more calls for dragnet operations, which would have extremely bad results.
The dude is 87. That means he was born around 1933. So, for most of the first 40 years of his life, about 1935 to 1973, dollars were a relatively safe investment; by contrast, a significant number of banks failed, losing all their depositors' money, though not in the US. Storing your life savings in dollars after 1973, whether in a bank or in cash, was not a reasonable idea, but maybe he was not alert enough to new financial developments to figure that out.
You yourself foolishly say, "Even in a 1% interest account, [US]$82k would make a good amount of interest to use for spending," apparently unaware that such a low interest rate is insufficient to compensate for even the lower rate of inflation the dollar is currently experiencing. That is to say, it amounts to a negative interest rate, once you adjust for inflation. If you had put a million dollars in a 1%-interest bank account in 1973 and not spent any of that interest, it would be 1.6 million dollars today, worth roughly 0.02 million 1973 dollars, depending on which deflator you measure against.
The family simply believed that they would be safe traveling through an airport, foolishly trusting that the government wouldn't simply steal the money just because they could. This naïve innocence is mirrored by your touching faith in banks, whose willingness to give you your money is also entirely conditioned on the government not simply stealing it — as everybody in my country found out in 2001.
This is precisely the kind of thing that makes people want to use Bitcoin.
Wolfram Vertical Line Alpha is terrible at citing sources, perhaps unsurprisingly given its own provenance, but it says it's using one of the BLS CPI deflators, which to my way of thinking systematically understate inflation over long periods of time; but there isn't an objectively correct deflator to use. If you instead use a basket of commodities made to the same standard in 2020 and 1973, such as crude oil, coal, or gold, it comes out closer to 0.02.
Yes, if you use exhaustible resources which become more expensive to extract relative to labor, sustainable goods, and everything else over time simply because the cheapest to extract are already extracted, you get a deflator that ridiculously overstates general inflation far more than any reasonable argument could be made that the headline CPI or any other commonly-used consumer inflation measure understates it.
Most gold in circulation today was mined before 1973, and it turns out that referencing to coal gives you the lowest inflation rate among these commodities. By contrast, the mainstream expense whose cost gives the highest inflation estimate is university tuition, which involves extracting no resources whatsoever. So your off-the-cuff guess about the reason for this discrepancy is not only incorrect, but apparently entirely divorced from the truth.
> and it turns out that referencing to coal gives you the lowest inflation rate among these commodities.
...and its still, over the period in question, a significantly higher rate than headline inflation.
> So your off-the-cuff guess about the reason for this discrepancy is not only incorrect
It wasn't an off-the-cuff guess and, as even the lowest-inflation extractive resource in the set inflated significantly faster than headline inflation, you haven't shown it was incorrect. (Also, that most gold was extracted before the period doesn't matter, current extraction is still a supply factor that influences price [though “they aren't making any more” would be an extreme version of the same effect, so even if it all was extracted before the period in question, that fact would reinforce rather than negate the description.])
"You yourself foolishly say, "Even in a 1% interest account, [US]$82k would make a good amount of interest to use for spending," apparently unaware that such a low interest rate is insufficient to compensate for even the lower rate of inflation"
You know what gives you much less protection against inflation? 0% interest. At least a 1% rate will significantly decrease the rate at which you lose spending power. If you keep your wealth in cash, you might as well light a few percent of it on fire every year.
And really, I'm not sure what your point is in general, you're sort of all over the place. You started out strong pointing out that older people, especially those from other countries, may well remember a time when putting all your money in the bank was a bad risk.
But then you sort of drift off and start implying that the risk of carrying your entire life savings in cash (monumentally fucking risky) is equivalent to the risk of bank and government insolvency (incredibly low risk). You really lost me there.
Also, if you think bitcoin is the answer to this, I have some bad news for you.
> start implying that the risk of carrying your entire life savings in cash (monumentally fucking risky) is equivalent to the risk of bank and government insolvency (incredibly low risk). You really lost me there
With two exceptions, literally everyone over 40 that I've seen in person in the last three years lost most of their life savings to bank and government insolvency. Many of the older people have lost them more than once. So did most of the people in the US in 1930, most of the people in Germany in the 1920s (and again in the 1940s), most of the people in the USSR in the 1990s, and so on. The US banking crisis in 2008 really only wiped out Bear Stearns and some FDIC-exceeding depositors in banks like WaMu, but it came very close to being a great deal worse. A very substantial fraction of the people alive today have lived through one of these events; a larger fraction will live through one in the next couple of decades.
People tend to systematically underestimate the probability of rare events like banking crises due to unfamiliarity with history and travel.
By contrast, the vast majority of people who carry their life savings in cash do not happen to get robbed that day. On average, a person might get robbed every ten years — more in big cities and high-crime countries, less in rural areas and low-crime countries. That's once every 36,500 days. Carrying around large amounts of cash increases that risk, but probably by less than an order of magnitude, since it's hard for muggers to tell when you're carrying it, unless they can X-ray you.
The odds are something like:
- lose your life savings to an economic crisis: about 1 in 3
- lose your life savings because you happen to get mugged on the one day you're carrying them across the country: about 1 in 10,000, unless you have a TSA or something equivalent
So, no, I was not implying that the risk of carrying your life savings in cash is equivalent to the risk of bank and government insolvency. That would be absurd; the risk of bank and government insolvency is three orders of magnitude higher. What I was saying (not very clearly, it seems) is that the safeguard against your life savings getting stolen by a TSA agent in the airport is an incorrupt government with working checks and balances to prevent such thefts, and that's the same safeguard you have against the government confiscating the contents of your bank account. If your government is so corrupt that it robs random people of their life savings in airports whenever it has the opportunity, there's no reason to expect that it will confine that corruption to airports.
> You started out strong pointing out that older people, especially those from other countries, may well remember a time when putting all your money in the bank was a bad risk.
You misunderstood that part too; I regret evidently having written so unclearly. I was saying that older people, especially those from the US, may well remember a time when keeping your money in dollars, whether in a bank or in your mattress, was a good risk, or at least not equivalent to lighting a few percent of it on fire every year. The dollar lost only about half of its value from 1933 to 1973, so it was a reasonable if suboptimal savings vehicle; since then it's lost 96% of its value.
> Also, if you think bitcoin is the answer to this, I have some bad news for you.
I'm all ears, but given the above, my expectations for this conversation are low. This had better be good.
I agree with the other commenters that victim blaming isn’t called for.
Also, I think you severely discount how many other people in this world don’t trust banks. It might be worth actually asking the question about _why_ and what experiences they had which might make them distrust such a massive industry. Putting your money in a bank is far from a zero risk proposition. Hell, putting your assets in a safety deposit box is also risky[1].
I've walked around with >$10k before (purchased a car with cash), and it's really not a problem. There's no reason anyone would see that money if it weren't for the TSA exposing all of our secrets at the security line. The problem here isn't the guy carrying a ton of cash, the problem is the TSA.
Is carrying a ton of cash usually a bad idea? Yes. Should it be a right to choose to go so? Absolutely.
In terms of potential for crime, I regularly carry >$20k worth of credit limit and have a similar total credit limit across all cards as the guy in the OP is carrying in cash. If someone knew how much credit I carry and how easily cards can be used illegally (I don't remember the last time I was asked for ID, and I've made many purchases over $500), I would likely have my credit cards stolen frequently. Losing my laptop means potentially getting access to all of my credit cards if I don't act in time. So is carrying my laptop cause for seizure as well since I could be defrauded?
I currently do most of my financials through online banking and credit cards, but that's because I don't want to pay the inflation tax and sales tax makes transactions complicated. However, that doesn't mean using cash is bad.
Anybody with large amounts of cash. If you don’t use digital banking, they can’t trace your spending easily and that becomes something close to enough evidence to Civil Asset Forfeiture your cash.
And I don’t like your argument because there are always a few extreme dummies who justify the policies at airports, so I don’t think the “all smart criminals will avoid detection” is strong enough to mean we should just drop all screening.
How about we stop assuming that lots of cash implies a crime? I bought my last car with cash, which I think is greater than the current "this is sketchy" limit since it was over $10k in $100 bills. I have also given and received gifts of similar magnitude. If it weren't for sales tax making change a royal pain, I would use cash far more often, in which case carrying a few hundred would be an everyday thing, and carrying a few thousand wouldn't be "weird".
I am really uncomfortable with asset forfeiture without at least a criminal charge, or preferably a conviction. Carrying a ton of cash may raise questions, but it should never be sufficient evidence for seizure.
My guess is you’ll never be in a position to have a lot of cash, keeping it from being a real problem for you, meaning you’ll forget all about this righteous little display of thought experimenting how the world ought to work and have accomplished nothing of value from it.
How about we stop doing that?
Put a real plan together in the legal sense and we’ll have something. Banal forum exercises like this are a fractional Bitcoin for a dozen.
> My guess is you’ll never be in a position to have a lot of cash, keeping it from being a real problem for you,
That's a little ignorant.
When buying a personal hobbyist aircraft (KitFox, which was a thing) engine, my father stuck 10k in his socks that he had withdrawn over a couple months when traveling to go take a look at the engine in Kansas or wherever he found it. I have had to deposit 25k in cash into a business account. These things are uncommon, but not rare.
God bless the Institute for Justice. Imagine all the billions our Gov't has thrown away in Afghanistan, and across the world . . . we know who the real crooks are . . . wikileaks taught us that . . .
Civil forfeiture cases have been in the news for more than five years now, how long are people going to let those guys get away with this? It's absurd. I'm willing to bet this will still be happening five years from now though.
> how long are people going to let those guys get away with this?
I’ve tried organising support for shifting New York law from its current “clear and convincing” standard to one requiring criminal conviction before seizure, as in Connecticut [1].
It’s hard to get people to show up, call their representatives and generally provide an electoral incentive for going through the difficulty of changing the law. Because most people don’t see themselves as potential criminals, and thus at risk of such seizures, it tends to get second fiddle to more pressing issues, e.g. wrapping up the war on drugs or healthcare.
Damn, I hope that family wins hard. This sort of theft is widespread amongst other law enforcement agencies as well. I hope that they win hard enough to make everyone stop (or at least curtail) stealing.
37 comments
[ 6.4 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] threadSeriously, what are they actually thinking? Are they fearful of banks? Is it out of frugality? Even in a 1% interest account, $82k would make a good amount of interest to use for spending.
Hell, imagine if the wrong person happened to get a peek at stacks of cash in someone's backpack? People could get killed in an instant over that.
It's not right, it's not ok, but tragically it continues to be legal.
It doesn't, and this LEO apologist narrative around here is what keeps things like this in place. This belief that such actions are the result of the victim's stupidity, and not the legal practices and judicial system that enable and ultimately legalize what amounts to theft is the source of the problem.
I feel bad for the elderly man, he came from a period where inherit Trust in law enforcement was basically the norm, perhaps ignorant and naive, but it can't help but underscore the times we live in.
For those who have never had anything taken away from them from Police its hard to explain the vulnerability and exposed sense of betrayal it leaves you with, especially when you're proven innocent. It makes you take so many precautions before leaving your home, not against the most cunning and slick of thieves, but those legally sanctioned to do so.
Also, I think the police in the USA right now are FAR more professional than they were when this guy was born. They literally didn’t use fingerprints or most kinds of forensic evidence. It was largely about picking up the person that most tweaked your spidey-sense and trying to work backwards from there. Today we have FAR more traceability of chain of evidence and documentation of actions by individual officers than ever before. I’m not apologizing for officers or bad policy, I just want to give credit where I think not enough is given.
It might still be a bad idea. I don't know what has changed since, but this source (0) says fingerprinting hasn't been subjected to scientific review.
[0] : https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/10/171005111100.h...
The reason much of it works at all is because it gets applied primarily where there is a lot of other extremely traditional evidence (witnesses, motive, etc.).
Overconfidence in science-theater investigations have been resulting in more calls for dragnet operations, which would have extremely bad results.
How about we don’t victim blame people, and instead decry unconstitutional seizure of assets.
You yourself foolishly say, "Even in a 1% interest account, [US]$82k would make a good amount of interest to use for spending," apparently unaware that such a low interest rate is insufficient to compensate for even the lower rate of inflation the dollar is currently experiencing. That is to say, it amounts to a negative interest rate, once you adjust for inflation. If you had put a million dollars in a 1%-interest bank account in 1973 and not spent any of that interest, it would be 1.6 million dollars today, worth roughly 0.02 million 1973 dollars, depending on which deflator you measure against.
The family simply believed that they would be safe traveling through an airport, foolishly trusting that the government wouldn't simply steal the money just because they could. This naïve innocence is mirrored by your touching faith in banks, whose willingness to give you your money is also entirely conditioned on the government not simply stealing it — as everybody in my country found out in 2001.
This is precisely the kind of thing that makes people want to use Bitcoin.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1.6+million+2020+dolla...
...and its still, over the period in question, a significantly higher rate than headline inflation.
> So your off-the-cuff guess about the reason for this discrepancy is not only incorrect
It wasn't an off-the-cuff guess and, as even the lowest-inflation extractive resource in the set inflated significantly faster than headline inflation, you haven't shown it was incorrect. (Also, that most gold was extracted before the period doesn't matter, current extraction is still a supply factor that influences price [though “they aren't making any more” would be an extreme version of the same effect, so even if it all was extracted before the period in question, that fact would reinforce rather than negate the description.])
You know what gives you much less protection against inflation? 0% interest. At least a 1% rate will significantly decrease the rate at which you lose spending power. If you keep your wealth in cash, you might as well light a few percent of it on fire every year.
And really, I'm not sure what your point is in general, you're sort of all over the place. You started out strong pointing out that older people, especially those from other countries, may well remember a time when putting all your money in the bank was a bad risk.
But then you sort of drift off and start implying that the risk of carrying your entire life savings in cash (monumentally fucking risky) is equivalent to the risk of bank and government insolvency (incredibly low risk). You really lost me there.
Also, if you think bitcoin is the answer to this, I have some bad news for you.
With two exceptions, literally everyone over 40 that I've seen in person in the last three years lost most of their life savings to bank and government insolvency. Many of the older people have lost them more than once. So did most of the people in the US in 1930, most of the people in Germany in the 1920s (and again in the 1940s), most of the people in the USSR in the 1990s, and so on. The US banking crisis in 2008 really only wiped out Bear Stearns and some FDIC-exceeding depositors in banks like WaMu, but it came very close to being a great deal worse. A very substantial fraction of the people alive today have lived through one of these events; a larger fraction will live through one in the next couple of decades.
People tend to systematically underestimate the probability of rare events like banking crises due to unfamiliarity with history and travel.
By contrast, the vast majority of people who carry their life savings in cash do not happen to get robbed that day. On average, a person might get robbed every ten years — more in big cities and high-crime countries, less in rural areas and low-crime countries. That's once every 36,500 days. Carrying around large amounts of cash increases that risk, but probably by less than an order of magnitude, since it's hard for muggers to tell when you're carrying it, unless they can X-ray you.
The odds are something like:
- lose your life savings to an economic crisis: about 1 in 3
- lose your life savings because you happen to get mugged on the one day you're carrying them across the country: about 1 in 10,000, unless you have a TSA or something equivalent
So, no, I was not implying that the risk of carrying your life savings in cash is equivalent to the risk of bank and government insolvency. That would be absurd; the risk of bank and government insolvency is three orders of magnitude higher. What I was saying (not very clearly, it seems) is that the safeguard against your life savings getting stolen by a TSA agent in the airport is an incorrupt government with working checks and balances to prevent such thefts, and that's the same safeguard you have against the government confiscating the contents of your bank account. If your government is so corrupt that it robs random people of their life savings in airports whenever it has the opportunity, there's no reason to expect that it will confine that corruption to airports.
> You started out strong pointing out that older people, especially those from other countries, may well remember a time when putting all your money in the bank was a bad risk.
You misunderstood that part too; I regret evidently having written so unclearly. I was saying that older people, especially those from the US, may well remember a time when keeping your money in dollars, whether in a bank or in your mattress, was a good risk, or at least not equivalent to lighting a few percent of it on fire every year. The dollar lost only about half of its value from 1933 to 1973, so it was a reasonable if suboptimal savings vehicle; since then it's lost 96% of its value.
> Also, if you think bitcoin is the answer to this, I have some bad news for you.
I'm all ears, but given the above, my expectations for this conversation are low. This had better be good.
Also, I think you severely discount how many other people in this world don’t trust banks. It might be worth actually asking the question about _why_ and what experiences they had which might make them distrust such a massive industry. Putting your money in a bank is far from a zero risk proposition. Hell, putting your assets in a safety deposit box is also risky[1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/safe-deposit-box...
That said, I don't keep all of my money in a bank. Nor do I keep it all in a tupperware container. I like to avoid accidentally creating honeypots.
Is carrying a ton of cash usually a bad idea? Yes. Should it be a right to choose to go so? Absolutely.
In terms of potential for crime, I regularly carry >$20k worth of credit limit and have a similar total credit limit across all cards as the guy in the OP is carrying in cash. If someone knew how much credit I carry and how easily cards can be used illegally (I don't remember the last time I was asked for ID, and I've made many purchases over $500), I would likely have my credit cards stolen frequently. Losing my laptop means potentially getting access to all of my credit cards if I don't act in time. So is carrying my laptop cause for seizure as well since I could be defrauded?
I currently do most of my financials through online banking and credit cards, but that's because I don't want to pay the inflation tax and sales tax makes transactions complicated. However, that doesn't mean using cash is bad.
And I don’t like your argument because there are always a few extreme dummies who justify the policies at airports, so I don’t think the “all smart criminals will avoid detection” is strong enough to mean we should just drop all screening.
I am really uncomfortable with asset forfeiture without at least a criminal charge, or preferably a conviction. Carrying a ton of cash may raise questions, but it should never be sufficient evidence for seizure.
How about we stop doing that?
Put a real plan together in the legal sense and we’ll have something. Banal forum exercises like this are a fractional Bitcoin for a dozen.
Is "hey government, don't steal people's money just because they have it" an unreal plan now?
That's a little ignorant.
When buying a personal hobbyist aircraft (KitFox, which was a thing) engine, my father stuck 10k in his socks that he had withdrawn over a couple months when traveling to go take a look at the engine in Kansas or wherever he found it. I have had to deposit 25k in cash into a business account. These things are uncommon, but not rare.
I’ve tried organising support for shifting New York law from its current “clear and convincing” standard to one requiring criminal conviction before seizure, as in Connecticut [1].
It’s hard to get people to show up, call their representatives and generally provide an electoral incentive for going through the difficulty of changing the law. Because most people don’t see themselves as potential criminals, and thus at risk of such seizures, it tends to get second fiddle to more pressing issues, e.g. wrapping up the war on drugs or healthcare.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_Unit...
show up to the airport with your life savings
the TSA agent retires with your money