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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

The US for example has several million 'undocumented' people. That's a rather pool of people to consider something impossible.

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This is something I know a lot about. Such people are systematically excluded from advancement in society in almost every respect, and the 'workarounds' that would allow them to participate fully and freely in the economy are crimes that can, at the discretion of prosecutors, result in the threat of a very heavy prison sentence. The penalties imposed for administrative non-compliance are wildly disproportionate to the scale of the offense.

This is by design; for quite a few years there was a notion in sentencing policy (and similar areas like this) that the best deterrent effect was obtained my multiplying the social cost of the offense by inverse probability of detection; that is to say, there is a fairly low chance of being caught but the people who do get caught are punished for both their infraction and that of all the people other people who weren't caught.

Essentially criminal justice today uses the language of morality (very popular with conservatives (qua Jefferson Sessions, who as an elf^H^H^H attorney-general is apparently magically immune from punishment despite his perjurious habits), but uses the logic of economics and incentives. The administration of criminal justice is for all practical purposes a commercial enterprise built around slave labor which depends on a steady supply of incarcerable people to function profitably.

A full discussion of this is beyond the scope of a HN comment or even a single article or book; entire careers have been devoted to the study and analysis of this issue. This law review article offers a somewhat accessible introduction.

http://www.masonlec.org/site/rte_uploads/files/Hylton_crimec...

True. However, they are not being actively pursued.

It's not enough if your 'Americas Most Wanted'. But, there are a lot of 'deadbeat' dads that are actively pursued. They often use similar methods and cash only jobs.

EX: Bike couriers are a good example of relatively high pay and often minimal documentation.

perhaps thats not disappearing though, merely hiding. I mean, being a cash in hand bike courier isn't going to set up a pension fund, is it? Old age is a long way off when you are 25, but it comes along eventually

I don't think you could really disappear depending on your pursuer/ threat model. However, if you were to make more money than you needed to survive you could presumably invest in something like Bitcoin or alt-currency and with the legalisation of crowd-funding you could potentially also make tangible investments in companies through similar mechanisms to the blockchain.

Again, I don't think you could knock the ball out of the park or allude a motivated state agency if you were a terrorist or something; but if you were in a similar position to the subject of the article you could probably avoid capture and maintain a semblance of normalcy.

That's just a question of money laundering. Drug lords can still buy stock it simply has much higher overhead and risks of it being confiscated.

The easiest thing to do would probably be to buy gold, which is not inflationary like money is supposed to be. Of course that's not as good as an index fund, but at least it's not cash.

You could also become a loan shark, which can be lucrative, but your illegal status would give your customers leverage against you, which is something you really don't want if this is your retirement savings...

Here's an idea: selling ETFs as physical documents, or as a sort of cryptocurrency. You could trade with others like cash, except it rises with inflation.

Keeping money under the mattress is a good way to get cleaned out if anyone gets too curious about how such a person saves.

Becoming a loan shark is a possibility, I suppose, but puts someone in direct competition with professional criminals and creates a whole new set of existential and legal problems.

One low-risk strategy I've heard of being used by cash-savvy people is purchasing food stamps at a discount to their face value. Again, pretty much any kind of black market activity comes with legal risks.

High pay? A really good courier makes maybe $40K. Most make less than that.

Even just 10$ an hour is good pay for under the table work. 40k is well past that.

Considering taxes for more conventional jobs, $40k under-the-table cash would be the equivalent of $60-70k of conventional wage income. Depending on city and state, that would be either solidly middle income or lower middle income.

First, many undocumented immigrants pay state and federal taxes; it's difficult to obtain a bank account otherwise. Second, their exclusion from the regular system of credit scoring and numerous other aspects of the economy that most people take for granted impose a significant hidden tax, albeit one that mostly flows to private actors such as landlords etc..

I'm not sure how that relates to my comment.

I was replying to the idea of $40k (cash, untaxed) as not much money. It corresponds to the take home of a middle class income in much of the US.

My point is that it's not really 'untaxed' in practice.

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