Breaking, civil forfeiture is uncivilized and should be unlawful.
But that ends the moment someone says it's theirs, or there are records pointing to an owner who isn't actively hiding from you. This whole modern "prove where you got it from" bs is just theft.
Inflation is a constant.
(And to pre-add, precious metals haven't historically been a great hedge either, when benchmarked against investing in economic growth)
Having spare cash around is never a bad idea. But there are precious few timelines in which the banking system collapses so completely that savings are inaccessible for extended periods (or at all) but paper U.S. dollars continue to hold value.
Genuinely curious for a single example of a collapsing country's fiat currency being useful for extradition.
If this is actually your fail case, hold foreign currency.
Not really. If U.S. cash is useful, so are dollars in a bank. Not in the very short term. But over a timeline of more than a week.
Storing tens of thousands of dollars of cash for an emergency is stupid, because almost every emergency that takes out the banking system renders that currency worthless. You’re better off having hard supplies or forex you can trade for exfiltration.
This is a strong assumption. So far I've experienced three cases of loosing access to my money in the bank for various reasons and I also witnessed one more case with my parents 25 years ago. In all four cases the cash was still useful, losing between 0% and 70% of the value.
None of that was in US of course, but I still think that your range of scenarios is too narrow.
If you want to have a reserve for a case when things go badly wrong, banks all go under, government can't bail them out, etc, then park some of your cash in yuan and rupee, in a piece of overseas realty, in gold bullion, and don't forget to invest in medical supplies, shells, and other such gear.
Different views of the future risks drive different decisions.
Getting taxed multiple times isn't necessarily bad, it's the overall burden (and deadweight loss!) that matters.
In any case, you could try moving to a lower tax jurisdiction? (And giving up your American passport, if you have any.)
* Nobody with a clue. Petty criminals do sometimes turn up at police stations looking for lost property of this kind and are then surprised to be arrested.
There is a parallel situation with the No Fly List, which is clearly unconstitutional in many cases but the Federal government is adroit at making sure no case with standing makes it to the USSC to be adjudicated, lest they lose this particular weapon.
And how is this ongoing? Have they just not yet encountered someone with the means (and strong enough case) to fight it tooth and nail up the courts?
The language is from Culley, which was decided last year [1]. I haven't seen any evidence that anyone is deflecting cases. Just that our judicial system is slow.
[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/22-585_k5fm.pdf
How long will it take the Federal Circuit to overrule this inexplicable nonsense? The novice reader may find that question to be ignorant, since the Supreme Court is the highest court of the United States. Those well acquainted with the industry know that the Supreme Court is not the final word on patentability, and while the claims at issue in this particular case are unfortunately lost, the Federal Circuit will work to moderate (and eventually overturn) this embarrassing display by the Supreme Court. This will eventually be accomplished the same as it was after the Supreme Court definitively ruled software is not patentable in Gottschalk v. Benson, and the same as the ruling in KSR v. Teleflex will be overruled. I have taken issue with Chief Judge Rader’s statements that nothing has changed in Federal Circuit jurisprudence as a result of KSR, which is not technically true. What is true, however, is that the Federal Circuit continues to refine the KSR “common sense test,” narrowing the applicability in case after case and tightening the ability for “common sense” to be used against an application. We are almost 5 years post KSR and there is still a lot of work left to be done by the Federal Circuit to finally overrule the Supreme Court’s KSR decision. It took almost 10 years to overrule Gottschalk v. Benson, so we are likely in for a decade of work to moderate the nonsense thrust upon the industry this morning.