It is absolutely not a far stretch. Let's take one example. If the TSA finds more than $10k on you while you are traveling, unless you have proper paperwork,

It is absolutely not a far stretch. Let's take one example. If the TSA finds more than $10k on you while you are traveling, unless you have proper paperwork, it is ASSUMED to be drug money and gets seized. Most people have no idea that they need this paperwork, and finding out how to fill it out is non-trivial. From 2000, to 2016, about $2 billion was seized in this way. In an independent audit, in over half of cases the action started and ended with the seizure. In less than 1/3 was anyone arrested. Arrests drop to less than 1/10 if you eliminate arrests for the crime of failing to fill out the paperwork for the money seized. (I am willing to bet that most of those arrests are because people react badly to seeing their life savings taken from them. Cause a scene, get arrested.) If you go to how many actually were charged with a crime, the figure drops to 0.3%. In other words in 99.7% of cases where the TSA took someone's money, nobody ever found evidence that they money was linked to a crime. (It was still not returned though.) Now the police will tell you that they are seizing drug money. However anecdotally, they mostly are not. And the fact that they are not even trying to charge people indicates to me that they really KNOW that they are not. But guess where the money goes? That's right, directly to the agency that seized it! (This varies for local police by state.) If your budget is filled with money confiscated from people who you have no evidence were involved with a crime, that's theft and you should know it. But their lawyers say that they can do it, so they continue to take people's life savings on little pretext.