Many people don't realize that you can leave with as much US currency as you like, but the government requires that you report any amount over $10,000.
You don't even need to leave the country, nor does it need to be a specific dollar amount. Thanks to civil asset forfeiture, simply driving down the road with a "suspicious" amount of cash is sufficient justification for police to take every penny you have on you. They don't spend the time to figure out whether you're a drug dealer or if you're on your way to buy a used car, they just take it and leave you with the legal quagmire of trying to get your own money back.
This happens because they're allowed to use the money to supplement their budgets, and because it costs a few thousand dollars to even hire a lawyer that can (potentially) get your money back. They've taken somewhere around $70 billion this way, over the past twenty years.
That's all true. I suspect they rely more on the currency reporting rules at airports because that's at least a hard and fast law that is being broken.
Other countries would probably take a more dim view of asset forfeiture based on nothing more than "you can't prove this wasn't earned illegally!" than of it's backed up with something. I'm curious what the actual penalty for failure to declare is though.
You don't even need to leave the country, nor does it need to be a specific dollar amount. Thanks to civil asset forfeiture, simply driving down the road with a "suspicious" amount of cash is sufficient justification for police to take every penny you have on you. They don't spend the time to figure out whether you're a drug dealer or if you're on your way to buy a used car, they just take it and leave you with the legal quagmire of trying to get your own money back.
This happens because they're allowed to use the money to supplement their budgets, and because it costs a few thousand dollars to even hire a lawyer that can (potentially) get your money back. They've taken somewhere around $70 billion this way, over the past twenty years.
That's all true. I suspect they rely more on the currency reporting rules at airports because that's at least a hard and fast law that is being broken.
Other countries would probably take a more dim view of asset forfeiture based on nothing more than "you can't prove this wasn't earned illegally!" than of it's backed up with something. I'm curious what the actual penalty for failure to declare is though.