Comment by mothballed 3 days ago
50K cash is under the real value of the $10k CTR cutoff when congress passed the bank secrecy act (around 85k in current USD), so you can see how this slippery slope of the erosion of the 'up to a certain amount' has only gotten worse.
The fact that society has normalized a silly burden upon the law abiding doesn't make it right or good or justifiable.
Well, if you are law abiding then you really should abide by the law and this particular thing has the force of law in many countries. Not doing it is by definition not being law abiding!
I've been in business for 42 years now. In all that time I have never seen more than 1000 Euros cash in any kind of business transaction, and I have never been offered to be paid in cash. It's always bank transfers on invoice. I've never bought a vehicle cash, I can't even begin to understand why or how someone would want to buy real estate cash. Besides the obvious risks of being robbed the whole idea of keeping that much money or more around in physical form feels strange to me.
Even in the 1980s when I would buy a vehicle it would be through a bank transfer. The only people that sometimes insist they want to do some transaction in cash are usually marketplace sellers that I suspect are professional sellers that are keeping their income out of sight of the taxman and restaurants where the POS machine 'just broke' that are doing the same. And when I say I do not have any cash and it's ok they can send me an invoice or give me their bank account number suddenly their machine starts working again. Ditto with cab drivers.
The fact that you think some small timers dodging paltry amounts of taxes is somehow justification is laughable. You can trot out any kind of criminal you want and it will not change my answer. People deserve the right to be able to transact, for any size transaction, without being forced under threat of violence to leave a paper trail. Now, many times they will leave a paper trail out of connivence, but that does not change the fact that they ought to have the option not to without threat of violence.
Somehow you completely missed the point that it's not even about being law abiding. It's about the redefinition of what "law abiding" is without any consideration at all about whether that redefinition is "right, good, or justifiable."
Just because there isn't more than 1000 Euros cash in people's hands is simply an indictment of the Euro as a currency and the culture around it.
The amount was just an example. Any kind of transaction using large amounts of cash is going to trigger flags all over the system and you can be expected to be quizzed on the origin of the funds. The only time I've seen someone that legitimately came by a suitcase full of cash it was when a waitress left her daughter said suitcase, which contained decades of tip money that she never spent. It was insanely heavy and it caused quite a few problems when she tried to do a deposit with her local bank.