When They Come For Your Cash, It Will Be For Your Own Good

We already see “This Wishing Well sponsored by Visa”.

You underestimate the power of bartering for merchandise. The power of gold backing money is overestimated. People are creative. Plus, at the rate things are going, the government will be destroyed for letting in all the illegals long before the money becomes a huge problem. (“once a hacker gets into your account you’re wiped out”—with credit cards, you just get a new card. Same with debit cards. I’ve never had my bank account stolen, but credit card numbers and debit cards numbers seem to be stolen on a seemingly regular basis. I get new cards and that’s it.)

I had a cousin who did want to put his money in stocks or the bank because what happens if the government collapses? Seriously, if the government collapses, money is the last thing you need to worry about. I feel much the same away about the government going to electronic money. It’s rather late in the game to worry now. Twenty years ago might have been a better time.

One additional note: A local woman had her wallet stolen right before Christmas from a Walmart store (it was her fault—she forget the wallet in a basket and some dishonest jerk took the wallet). The woman was most concerned that the theif knew her address now and had her identity. However, she also lost $2000 in cash that she was Christmas shopping with. Like credit or not, had she been using credit cards, a call to the card issuer and the credit is immediately cut off. Cash is not replaceable and you lose it all.

Remember the old TV show “Max Headroom”? All money was electronic and traceable, credit fraud was one of the worst crimes, and if the government didn’t like you they could take all your money. Sure, it was a dystopian future but one that could happen. As it is, it’s outrageous that our government can seize large deposits and hold them indefinitely — as many small cash-based businesses have found out.

Ever read James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State?

This is another way to make the citizenry legible to those with the power.

Individual humans tend to set up complex, informal arrangements with one another all the time. Example – I give my friend some gas money for a trip we are taking. Is that income? Is he my chauffeur? Government, with e-only money, will say yes!

These arrangements are difficult for an outsider to penetrate, regulate, and tax, so they must be eliminated. Complexity in private affairs is the norm, and it must be eliminated in the private space. The thing is that the public space then becomes more byzantine and complex, as more folks that know what’s best decide on more and more ways for you to properly be spending your money and your time.

Gail, it’s not just money. They can take your clacker balls too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Article_Consisting_of_50,000_Cardboard_Boxes_More_or_Less,_Each_Containing_One_Pair_of_Clacker_Balls

” We’ve heard of folks who run small stores who make regular small deposits have their funds stolen by the government because their deposits are “suspicious.” No proof of crime is needed. Just suspicion. ”

You have a strange definition of small. We are talking about deposits in the $8-9K range.

“No proof of crime is needed. Just suspicion.”

Not exactly true. Deliberately setting up deposits to avoid the $10K reporting requirement is itself a crime even if the money comes from strictly legal sources. The problem here is not with IRS / DOJ processes, but with the law itself. The law is explicitly written such that you don’t even need to be aware that trying to avoid the reporting of $10+ deposits is illegal.
And this is exactly what happened in the specific case discussed in the link you provided. Granted, the structuring was done on the very bad advice of a bank teller who probably wanted to avoid doing the extra paperwork to report the deposit.

MattS is referring to The “Bank Secrecy Act”, in which your private relationship with your bank is made no longer secret. George Orwell, call your office?

They file a “suspicious activity report”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspicious_activity_report

“generally is any financial transaction that does not make sense to the financial institution”.

Even Alex Hamilton would shudder at how insane our laws have become.

Civil asset forfeiture is a big problem, and these IRS examples are nothing compared to what’s local police departments are doing all over the country with this. I’d like to see congress address this as a civil rights matter and put a stop to it for once and for all. It’s up to you cons to tell your representatives to act. Most of the Dems are already with you on this.

JMJ

You have a strange definition of small. We are talking about deposits in the $8-9K range.

Make multiple cash transactions within a certain (and largely unspecified) period, even if less the $1K at a time, you are running the risk of this happening to you. The claim will be ” deliberately setting up deposits to avoid the $10K reporting requirement”. It doesn’t matter that you merely wanted to keep the money more safely. Sometimes being safe is dangerous in itself.

apropos of nothing:

The Swiss are being asked to delay paying taxes because negative interest rates punish towns for holding money

The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment

Why Are Criminals Stealing Tide Detergent and Using It for Money?

Apparently, the Dept of Justice has just put some brakes on Civil Asset Forfeiture to make it much harder for police to seize cash without a warrant:

http://www.businessinsider.com/r-us-attorney-general-bans-asset-seizure-by-local-police-2015-1

Article is entitled: “The Feds Just Restricted The Law That Lets Police Seize Stuff From Innocent People” by Christina Sterbenz, Erin Fuchs and Reuters & is dated Jan 16th, 2016.

RE: “We’ve heard of folks who run small stores who make regular small deposits have their funds stolen by the government because their deposits are “suspicious.” No proof of crime is needed. Just suspicion.”

I’d wager there’s more to the story than reported — a number of the examples posted showed store owners admitting deposits just under the $10K limit, consistently, with them claiming they ‘didn’t know’ that $10K was a reporting threshhold. That ignorance is kinda hard to believe.

The article omits any mention if the police consulted tax records to align cash deposits with reported income — tax records are readily accessible, you know…

IF one has a truly legitimate business, AND, is honest on their taxes
THEN there is no reason why a few deposits at or over $10K makes any difference at all.
None.

Put another way,
if you deal with large amounts of cash routinely,
and are honest,
the occasional $10K deposit will be an indicator to law enforcement that you’re legit.

For those interested in gold-backed vs fiat dollars consider the following: https://zippycatholic.wordpress.com/2015/10/28/gold-backed-currency-fiat-dollars-in-a-house-of-mirrors/

Ken,

Please define “legitimate”?

You mean “approved of by the local, state, and federal tyrants, having paid all the appropriate excise fees, and abiding by all onerous regulations, and having the appropriate license granted by competitors who control the state apparatus for such?”

Also, in regards to Holder’s change in “policy” – “policy” is the watchword for tyrants. If this behavior can be curbed by a change in policy, then this is a government of men, not of laws.

The article indicates these individuals often took the word of their mother, bank teller, etc. In some cases, the stated intent was to “avoid paperwork”. That should have been a red flag. Paperwork avoidance lands people in jail sometimes. It does seem problematic that banks cannot tell people, but I suppose one could argue that would be warning criminals. The article does note that this practice has been modified.

I agree with Nate that “legitimate” is a rather unclear term. The article states that having made repeated cash deposits for a business, even with receipts and bank statements, does not stop the enforcers from taking the money. In the case of the Mexican restaurant, the owner had done this for years and the bank management change to an adherent of the letter of the law is what triggered the change. People do have to do more research on cash and bank deposits before making them, but anything in cash that totals $10,000 can apparently trigger this. Keep your money in your mattress. It’s safer.

Two other related scenarios:

1. As in Cyprus, the banks are holding bad loans. Hey, lookey here. All this ‘cash’ we are holding from our friendly customers. Let’s just refuse to let them withdraw the money electronically and take some to cover our losses.

2. Ever worse, consumer spending is down. Tax collections are down. Hey, Ms Fed Chairman. can you reduce interest rates to -2%. We need to get these folks to stop saving money and start spending it. Nothing better than Centralized Economy Planning.

The government will be able to track every transaction.
Oh good. Now maybe they can find the guys who got into the IRS system, stole my information, and thus required the IRS to give me a year of free credit tracking.

No, I will never give up using cash, and I don’t care if “the government” (whoever they are) decide for themselves that I must have ‘something to hide’ as a consequence. I’m old fashioned, I don’t believe in being in debt, in spending money I don’t have, and yet all of the alternatives (especially credit cards) encourage reckless spending and lack the most basic of privacy safeguards. By the time the ‘cashless society’ truly arrives (around 2025? 2030?), I’ll probably be dead anyway, so no problem there.

Heh.
“Cash” – as in coins and notes – may disappear, but the concept won’t.
Why?
Because the writers of laws, being the dishonest lot they are, know that they themselves need some form of guarenteed and untracable funding with which to line their own pockets and feather their own nests. So you may have a plastic card or digital certificate instead a bag full of pieces of paper, but you certainly will be able to have “cash” or “bearer” money in one form or another – at least until the glorious revolution arrives and the whole political class is placed against the wall for their deserved “crimes against the proletariat”.

Rah,

Bitcoin is good if you have to launder money. Other than that it is good for not much.

Briggs,

With all the negativity coming from the right no wonder people want to die.

Sylvain,

You made Briggs point for him. Good show.

It must be mighty cold in Hell today, because I agree with Jersey McJones about civil asset forfeiture. The Institute for Justice, a libertarian public-interest law firm, has long been trying to stop the abuse.

Most of the Dems are already with you on this.

I take back part of what I said about McJersey. I followed the IJ’s links to discover the co-sponsors of the reform bill.

In the House: Republican [53], Democratic [37]. In North Carolina, where I live, all three co-sponsors, including my representative, are Republican. In Florida, where McJersey lives: Republican [5], Democratic [2].

In the Senate: Democratic [2], Republican [2], Independent [1].