3 ms·

>I've always wondered why the line is drawn at $5,000. It's mildly interesting that stealing $46M and stealing $5,000 result in equivalent charges. A lot of th

by Arrath 5y ago

>I've always wondered why the line is drawn at $5,000. It's mildly interesting that stealing $46M and stealing $5,000 result in equivalent charges. A lot of those lines are drawn completely arbitrarily, and might be very old and haven't been updated to reflect inflation/rising prices. A classmate of mine copped a felony property damage charge as the threshold was set at a mere $500 at the time, for a typical senior year high school rivalry prank and it really fucked up his life.

anonporridge 5y ago
Tacking on the conversation about arbitrary and static dollar amounts in law. There's an interesting effect where law makers can pass a law with static dollar amounts that seems reasonable at the time, but the force of inflation covertly expands the scope of the state's authority deeper and deeper into the society without any further action or political risk by present lawmakers. A great example of this is the Bank Secrecy Act, which requires reporting of transactions greater than $10,000 to the federal government. At the time it was passed in 1970, $10k was the equivalent of ~$70k in 2021 dollars. $70k actually seems like a pretty reasonable amount as that's a very large transfer that the average person does very rarely for mostly legitimate reasons, like buying a house. It's easy to justify why the feds could use this data to investigate large scale criminals and money laundering. But as inflation has stripped away the value of the dollar, more and more people and activities are falling into that $10k limit. Basically, the surveillance state gets to sneakily expand when laws are pegged to a currency that's constantly inflating by design.
- Tildey 5y ago
  And of course, governments rarely want to change these laws of antiquity, because it is perceived as being "soft on crime". The optics of it to a lot of the voting population is poor, even if the change is just to be in line with the original intention of the law.
- gopher_space 5y ago
  > more and more people and activities are falling into that $10k limit. Like what?
  - anonporridge 5y ago
    What do you mean? $10k in 1970 was the equivalent of $70k today. So all the transactions between 10k-70k in today's dollars would not have been included in the original intent of the law, but are now included today. I won't pretend to know all the kinds of transactions that fall under that scope.

by Arrath 5y ago

anonporridge 5y ago

Tacking on the conversation about arbitrary and static dollar amounts in law. There's an interesting effect where law makers can pass a law with static dollar amounts that seems reasonable at the time, but the force of inflation covertly expands the scope of the state's authority deeper and deeper into the society without any further action or political risk by present lawmakers. A great example of this is the Bank Secrecy Act, which requires reporting of transactions greater than $10,000 to the federal government. At the time it was passed in 1970, $10k was the equivalent of ~$70k in 2021 dollars. $70k actually seems like a pretty reasonable amount as that's a very large transfer that the average person does very rarely for mostly legitimate reasons, like buying a house. It's easy to justify why the feds could use this data to investigate large scale criminals and money laundering. But as inflation has stripped away the value of the dollar, more and more people and activities are falling into that $10k limit. Basically, the surveillance state gets to sneakily expand when laws are pegged to a currency that's constantly inflating by design.

Tildey 5y ago
And of course, governments rarely want to change these laws of antiquity, because it is perceived as being "soft on crime". The optics of it to a lot of the voting population is poor, even if the change is just to be in line with the original intention of the law.
gopher_space 5y ago
> more and more people and activities are falling into that $10k limit. Like what?
- anonporridge 5y ago
  What do you mean? $10k in 1970 was the equivalent of $70k today. So all the transactions between 10k-70k in today's dollars would not have been included in the original intent of the law, but are now included today. I won't pretend to know all the kinds of transactions that fall under that scope.